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GNADENSEE 



GNADENSEE 



THE LAKE OF GRACE 



A MORAVIAN PICTURE 
IN A CONNECTICUT FRAME 



BY 

EDWARD O. DYER 



With Illustrations 



BOSTON 

Xlbe pilatlm press 

CHICAGO 



THE LiBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

JUN 4 '<^03 

^ Copyiight tntiy 
CLASS CU XXc No 

h I 1 ! 

COPY B. 



. No 

J 



Copyright, 1903 
By Edward O. Dyer 



Press of J. J. Arakelyan, 

295 Congress St., 

Boston 



^ 



0^ 



,..^^ 



TO MY WIFE 

Whose Window in the Sharon Manse 
Looks out on that Mountain 
Which looks down on the Lake of Grace 
This Souvenir of our Sharon Life 

1f6 DeMcate& 



CONTENTS 



PART I.— THE PICTURE 

Preface 9 

Poem, Gnadensee 13 

The Indian Villages and Lands 15 

Unitas Fratrum 27 

A Count and Saint 2i7 

The Mission at Gnadensee 49 

A Baron and Countess at the Lake .... 57 

A Wequadnach Letter 6^^ 

The Heart of Bruce 69 

Apostolic Succession 79 

The Monument 87 

A Window in Bethlehem 97 

The Higher Patriotism 11 1 

Along the Sharon Shore 119 

PART II.— THE FRAME 

The Stairs of Gnadensee 127 

The Soul of the Pines 147 

An Old Ore Bed 159 

A Village Street 173 

A Pastor of the Church Militant . . . -195 

Shekomeko 203 

The Reservation at Scatacook 211 

The Webotuck Valley 223 

The Lost Brook and the Fountain of Youth . 239 

Troutbeck 251 

The Alandar Trail 263 

The Lake Country of Connecticut .... 277 

Echoes and Ripples 287 



PREFACE 

Gibbon tells us that it was at Rome, as he sat musing 
amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars 
were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the 
idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first came 
to him. The present modest book was written because its 
author was charmed by the sound and meaning of the 
name which stands as its title. Upon investigation, that 
name opened up a story of rare interest, — revealed char- 
acters which are the crystallization and quintessence of 
love and faith. Because the name and the story set them- 
selves into a beautiful country it was impossible not to 
describe that also. 

The picturesque scenery of Connecticut is concentrated 
in its northwestern corner. Mountain, lake and river 
blend into a region of rugged grandeur and pastoral beauty ; 
legend and history are not lacking. Three states meet in 
this borderland — great commonwealths, whose influence is 
the country's destiny. This borderland is the frame of 
the picture. The book is in two parts, but the axis of the 
whole is the Lake of Grace. 

The first part is the history and study of an old mis- 
sion, a chapter in church history which is well-nigh for- 
gotten and was long neglected. The spot may not equal 
lona in importance, but it was part of a movement which 
surpassed it in heroism and the influence of whose conse- 
cration we still feel and shall always need. 

The second part is descriptive and briefly biographical, a 
memory of outings with interpretation and suggestion. 
There are always those who long to know and do new 
things, who frame the common into some ideal relation 
they have discovered. This part was written for them and 
for that shifting, restless, ever-growing tourist-class which 
yearly seeks these hills and mountains. Nor is it altogether 
presumption to seek to awaken a stronger, deeper love for 
what we always had, but never really knew as native resi- 
dents. 

It is most earnestly hoped that both parts of the book 
and all of its chapters may be stones of memorial to pre- 
serve fast-vanishing memories and traditions. With that 
hope, these pages are given to the local and to the larger 
public. 



PART I 

THE PICTURE 



GNADENSEE 

Lake beneath Poconnuck sleeping. 

Mirror of his double crown. 
Jewel that some sachem misses 

From his bright belt falling down, 
Pure white lilies round thee circle. 

Thy face is by the blue sky kissed, 
Thou art set in pearl and opal 

With a central amethyst. 

Lake "extending to the mountain," 

Wequadnach, in the Indian tongue. 
Name writ oft in lore of missions. 

Thou hast merit left unsung. 
Where now sigh the scattered pine trees, 

Once the Indian wigwams stood. 
And the dead were buried near them. 

On the shore and in the wood. 

Hither came Baron de Watteville, 

On his holy mission glad, 
David Bruce, the Indian teacher. 

Nobler knight than Galahad, 
O'er the pallid lake they rowed him, 

White as samite was his shroud, 
Indian converts who had loved him. 

And who wept and sobbed aloud — 
O'er his grave a marble sentry. 

In it cut some unknown years, 
Where the winds and waves are wailing. 

And the heart is full of tears. 



GNADENSEE 

These were not the Minnesingers, 

Swabian songs of love and youth, 
But an exiled, ancient people, 

With their holy hymns of truth. 
On bleak mountains they had sung them, 

At the stake in fire and blood, 
Greenland's shores were now to listen, 

And these red men of the wood. 
Where the Southern Cross is bending 

Lustrous o'er the Carib Sea, 
Slaves can hear the praise ascending 

Of a solemn litany. 
Gone are all our poor distinctions, 

Breath of fame and pride of birth; 
Love has found his throne and scepter. 

Men are brothers round the earth. 

Lake upon New England's border, 

With a fair Moravian name. 
Unto which, across the ocean, 

Saintly souls in longing came. 
There are ripples on thy water. 

There are echoes on thy shore, 
Which, once started, never leave us, 

But go on forevermore; 
For they touch the soul of being, 

Stirring depths far out of sight, 
Heard across life's dim, low levels. 

Sounds like voices in the night — 
Not these known and living voices. 

Speaking through the wires in air. 
But a deeper, holier message 

From the wireless worlds afar. 
Gnadensee, thou gem of beauty, 

Gnadensee, thou Lake of Grace, 
To the stranger tell thy story. 

To the lover show thy face. 



THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS 



THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS 



At the foot of Indian Mountain, lying partly in 
the town of Sharon, Connecticut, is one of those 
many lakes which make this region a landscape of 
renown. As one climbs the mountain and looks 
down he sees that there are two lakes beneath its 
shaggy brow. They are on opposite sides and seem 
like eyes through which the soul of beauty looks up 
at the mountain and the stars. 'Tis hard to tell 
which is the fairer or which the mountain loves the 
most. The Indians had villages upon each of them, 
but seem to have preferred the western one inas- 
much as their principal village was upon its shore. 
They called this lake and the village Wequadnach, 
but left the other nameless, left it to the sighing 
sedge, the water-fowl and that commercial spirit of 
these latter days which has erected a grist-mill and 
an electric light factory at its outlet. 

There can be no doubt about these villages at 
17 



GNADENSEE 

the foot of Indian Mountain. The Rev. Cotton 
Mather Smith, who was pastor of the Congrega- 
tional Church in Sharon for over fifty years, having 
been ordained in 1755, sent in 1800 to Benjamin 
Trumbull, the historion of Connecticut, the follow- 
ing information concerning the location and size of 
the villages : 

"Previous to the settlement already mentioned," 
— evidently the settlement of the town which be- 
gan in the spring of 1739 with the arrival of from 
fourteen to twenty families from Colchester and 
Lebanon, — "there were between two and three 
hundred Indians that resided in the Northwest part 
of the town in two villages ; the one by the side 
of a large pond, now known by the name of In- 
dian Pond, which consisted of about twenty-five 
wigwams ; the other village was situated in a large 
meadow at the south end of a large pond, now 
known by the name of Mudge Pond, containing 
about ten or fifteen huts or wigwams." The Rev. 
Sheldon Davis, an Episcopal clergyman who care- 
fully investigated the antiquities of Duchess 
County, New York, in a pamphlet published in 
1858, says, "Another portion formed a colony at 
Wechquatnach, on the eastern border of Indian 
Pond, in the town of Sharon, Conn." This colony, 

18 



THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS 

we learn, was caused by the breaking up later of 
the Indian settlement at Shekomeko, so that orig- 
inally and afterwards there was a very considerable 
village here on the shore of Indian Pond. Tra- 
dition has handed down what the oldest inhabitants 
repeat, that on the Millerton Road, not far from 
an old ore bed at the foot of Indian Mountain, was 
the Indian village. Here arrow heads used to be 
found and in the meadow by the lake Indian skulls 
have been ploughed up. We need not then view 
these Indians through the haze of myth or legend. 
Here they had a local habitation and a name. Here 
were clearings for their cornfields, here in the 
Sharon ponds they fished, here wound their paths 
below the mountain and here among the fragrant 
pines curled the smoke of their wigwams. 

The Rev. Cotton Mather Smith further says : 
"These Indians were of a superior size, and prob- 
ably part of the Stockbridge tribe." They must 
then have been Mohicans, a part of the great Al- 
gonquin family, a family which in intelligence and 
physical qualities stands among the first of the 
North American Indians. Eliot, the apostle to the 
Indians, translated the Bible into a dialect which 
these Sharon Indians would have had no difficulty 
in understanding. That longest word in his Bible 

19 



GNADENSEE 

(Mark i : 40), Wutappesittukqussunnoohzvehtunkquoh, 
which means kneehng down to him, they doubtless 
understood, 

Jonathan Edwards, the younger, understood this 
Mohican language perfectly. He loved it, thought 
in it; it became more familiar to him, he tells us, 
than his mother tongue. His boyhood spent at 
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, resulted in a most val- 
uable paper on the Mohican language. He has 
written out the Lord's Prayer just as these Sharon 
Indians must have often repeated it, and from his 
list of Mohican words we see that we have been 
using Mohican all our life, appropriating words 
like tomahawk, moccasin, wigwam and Manitou. 

The stone hatchets and arrow heads found 
around Indian Pond indicate that these Indians 
were unacquainted with the use of metals. A white 
man was a "knife-man." They were in the stone 
age of development, or rather undevelopment, since 
it is quite as possible that men have forgotten the 
knowledge of the useful arts as that they have 
never known them. The American Indians like 
all races seem to have had an older and earlier civ- 
ilization if we can judge by the Mound Builders 
and the ruins of Aztec temples. 

The Indians at the foot of Indian Mountain were 
20 



THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS 

idolaters. Our clerical informant says, "These In- 
dians were under the direction of five chiefs called 
Mughoca. They had an Idol which they wor- 
shipped as God, and committed to the care of an 
old squaw. This Idol, though inferior to the great 
God that governed the world, was nevertheless in- 
vested with power suflficient to repel those evils 
brought upon them by Mutonto, or the Devil ; and 
in case he refused or neglected to afford them as- 
sistance, they would severely chastise him." This 
is much like ourselves, who, to escape a difficulty 
or dilemma are said to whip the devil round the 
stump. Although idolaters, these Indians were not 
materialists. They believed in another life, a world 
of spirit and personality. 

The name of their village, Wequadnach,' means 
"place at the end of (or extending to) the moun- 
tain." The mountain they called Poconnuck, which 
means "cleared land," that is, land from which the 
trees and bushes had been removed so as to fit it 
for cultivation. Land used for planting was either 
naturally clear or else made so. Land of the latter 
kind was always calld Poquannoc or Pequonnuc, a 

*This name is written Wechquadnach frequently. The 
Moravian missionaries wrote it Wachquatnach, but in this 
book the spelling of Trumbull, the great authority on In- 
dian names, is adhered to. 

21 



GNADENSEE 

word for which there are various spellings and which 
is the name of many localities in Connecticut. 

One of the remarkable finds throwing light on 
the character of these Indians at Wequadnach was 
the discovery, at about the time of the writing of 
this book, of some pottery, bones and shells in a 
rock shelter near the foot of Indian Mountain on 
its west side. The collection is undoubtedly In- 
dian and of great value. There is the frontal bone 
of a deer or stag, the jaw and teeth of some animal, 
other longer teeth, pieces of tortoise-shell and the 
shells of the fresh-water clam. Rarest and most 
valuable of all, are specimens of broken pottery, 
showing by no inconsiderable decorative skill that 
there was in these rude men the love of beauty. 
Indian pottery is very fragile and rarely found. If 
this is Indian, as at present seems probable, 
the find is of much more than local import- 
ance. Clinging to this region around the lake 
and mountain is many a tradition of Indian oc- 
cupation. 

Although the Indians were never sufficiently 
numerous to prove dangerous to the safety of the 
white settlers, they did cause some uneasiness be- 
cause of a belief that they had been wronged in 
the sale of their lands. It is charitable to believe 

22 



THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS 

that there was some misunderstanding. Sedgwick, 
in his "History of Sharon" says, "The Colony of 
Connecticut ever made it a practice to deal justly 
by the Indian claimants before they attempted to 
dispose of its lands by settlements." There is a 
petition to the General Assembly of the Colony, un- 
der date of May, 1742, in which certain citizens of 
Sharon together with Stephen Nequitimaugh Nan- 
hoon, and others of the Indian natives residing in 
the town, ask that a committee be appointed to 
examine and inquire into the claims of the Indians. 
As a result of this petition a committee was ap- 
pointed which made a long and elaborate report. 
Believing that the Indians had misunderstood the 
bargain made with them, the committee recom- 
mended that a certain quantity of land not ex- 
ceeding fifty acres be set ofif to them. This does 
not seem a very generous concession to the lords 
oif the soil. The trouble arose because the pro- 
prietors of the town, who were a legal corporation, 
thought themselves entitled by their purchase to a 
common and undivided township. They supposed 
the Indian lands in the northwest part of the town 
were theirs because a certain Lamb,^ of whom the 

^Lamb purchased his extensive Indian rights in Salis- 
bury and Sharon, for the consideration of eighty pounds 
and divers victuals and clothes. 

23 



GNADENSEE 

purchase was made, had previously bought up the 
Indian titles. The Indians said they had never 
sold what Lamb claimed, that he took advantage of 
their ignorance, defrauded and deceived them. 
Whatever was sold, they had never bargained away 
everything, and they now laid claim to ninety acres 
they had improved and a large part of the moun- 
tain for fire-wood. This the proprietors were un- 
willing to grant. 

As so often happens in this world, the weaker 
had to take what they could get. One could wish 
that the proprietors of the town had given the In- 
dians the mountain they loved, as a reservation for- 
ever. That would have softened and removed the 
growing quarrel. The Indians, naturally, were not 
satisfied. A legal sale, though agreed to, may be 
unjust in the extreme and even when it is just may 
break the heart. Who can will away his ancestral 
acres, go out into the world homeless and alone 
without a repining that ofttimes is rebellion? The 
Indians at last deeded away every right to their 
lands by beautiful Wequadnach. One cannot read 
that deed unmoved. It is drawn by a master 
hand. There could be no more dispute. The In^ 
dian lands were gone forever. 

Soon after the sale of their lands the Indians 
24 



THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS 

themselves dispersed. Tribal unity and village life 
were gone. A remnant remained in the town but 
many went to the Moravian settlements in Pennsyl- 
vania, to Wyoming and Gnadenhutten (Tents of 
Grace). Like the leaves of the autumn they had 
withered away. The spring's renewal might clothe 
the forest again, but the children of the forest had 
departed. No curling smoke arose above the tree- 
tops. The canoes sped no more as of old across 
the waters of the lake. Oni the eastern shore there 
is a grove where the carriage drives slowly and one 
stops to catch the scent of the pines. The south 
wind in the branches is a sigh and a dirge for these 
children of nature whose graves are not far away. 
In the spring the meadow-larks come back as of 
yore; the hepaticas and the trailing arbutus peep 
out from under their leafy carpet on Indian Moun- 
tain, and the Ten Mile River or Webotuck, into 
which Wequadnach empties, goes singing down its 
beautiful valley through the alder thickets and 
green meadows, but Indian eyes look not on this 
picture of their childhood. In the frosty autumn 
mornings when the maples blush in scarlet and the 
white fog curls below Poconnuck or clings to its 
shaggy side one thinks even more of a lost and 
vanished race. Those wreathing mists are then the 

25 



GNADENSEE 

altar-curtains of the hills or the ghosts of Indian 
souls, according to the fancy of the beholder. 

"Sweetest of all childlike dreams 

In the simple Indian lore 
Still to me the legend seems 

Of the shapes who flit before. 

From the clefts of mountain rocks, 
Through the dark of lowland firs, 

Flash the eyes and flow the locks 
Of the mystic Vanishers ! 

Fringed with gola their mantles flow 
On the slopes of westering knolls; 

In the wind they whisper low 
Of the Sunset Land of Souls." 

— Whittier. 



26 



UNITAS FRATRUM 



"Ever since I became more intimately acquainted with 
the Moravians, my inclination to this Society, which had 
united under the victorious banners of Christ, had con- 
stantly increased. It is exactly in the moment of its earli- 
est formation that a positive religion possesses its greatest 
attraction. On that account it is delightful to go back to 
the time of the apostles, where all stands forth as fresh 
and immediately spiritual. And thus it was that the Mo- 
ravian doctrine acquired something of a magical charm by 
appearing to continue or rather to perpetuate the condition 
of those first times." — Autobiography of Goethe. 



UNITAS FRATRUM 



It would be a libel upon our Puritan ancestors to 
say they cared nothing for the salvation of the In- 
dians. It is a witticism whose injustice still stings 
to say the first thing they did after landing in the 
New World was to fall on their knees and the next 
was to fall on the aborigines. John Robinson's 
noted wish that they had converted some before 
they had killed any, the splendid work of Eliot and 
his praying Indians, the labors of Mayhew and 
David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards, Eleazer 
Wheelock with his Indian School at Lebanon, Con- 
necticut, the one at Cornwall, with many other 
achievements, are only the manifestation of a desire 
whose nobility and success we too feebly praise. 
It is to the credit of Sharon that the fathers of the 
town, in the memorial already referred to, peti- 
tioned the General Assembly of the Colony of Con- 
necticut in 1742 that the Indians in the township 

29 



GNADENSEE 

be instructed in the doctrines of the gospel. But 
when all is done and said it must be granted that 
the missionary spirit did not belong to the Puri- 
tans as a body. The Indians to them were bloody 
"salvages," pagans, a people to be conquered and 
dispossessed like the Canaanites of old. The Puri- 
tan was an Old Testament saint. He did not 
deeply love the Indian ; the horrors of King Phil- 
ip's War had made himi too stern and relentless 
for that. Missionary work was never the first 
thing with him, but a kind of annex to his political 
mission and divine election in the world. It is to 
Herrnhut and Moravia that we must look for the 
purest examples of missionary zeal. When the 
first settlers of Sharon were planning to get titles 
to the lands around Indian Pond, missionaries from 
over the sea were coming to these same lands, not 
to possess them but to save the souls of the Indian 
possessors. They changed the name of the lake 
from Wequadnach to Gnadensee; gave it a Chris- 
tian name and baptism. The story of the lake can- 
not be told without giving a brief history of the 
Moravian people. 

It is always interesting to trace a great move- 
ment back to its source. About the middle of the 
ninth century Methodius and Cyril, great names in 

30 



UNITAS FRATRUM 

religious history, had converte'd parts of Austria 
to Christianity, translated the Bible into the ver- 
nacular and introduced a ritual of worship. In 
Moravia and Bohemia had grown up an old Protes- 
tant Church whose members were known officially 
as Unitas Fratrum or The United Brethren. The 
attempt of Rome to establish ecclesiastical jurisdic- 
tion over these provinces led to a protest and re- 
volt. The opposition culminated in the Bohemian 
Reformation of which John Huss was the distin- 
guished leader. The Council of Constance con- 
demned him as a heretic to be burned at the stake, 
but out of his ashes arose the Brethren's Church. 
Sixty years before Luther had nailed his theses to 
the church door in Wittenberg and one hundred 
before the Anglican Church was established in 
England, on the borders of Bohemia and Silesia 
the proscribed followers of John Huss began to 
call one another Brethren and to elect their bish- 
ops. 

In their rugged mountain cradle these people 
were subjected to the bitterest persecution. They 
were called "Pitmen" or "Burrowers." Their condi- 
tion was like that of the Vaudois in Piedmont, and 
the Camisards in Southern France. At times they 
gathered in the intense cold of a Bohemian winter 

31 



GNADENSEE 

to read the Scriptures around camp-fires which they 
did not dare to kindle by day lest the smoke should 
betray where they were. On the way to their place 
of worship they would tread one in the steps of 
another, the last comer dragging a pine branch be- 
hind him to obliterate the tracks in the snow. At 
the time of the Reformation four hundred churches 
with a membership of two hundred thousand ex- 
isted among the Brethren, who counted in their 
number many nobles and barons. But the cruel 
Ferdinand II, who came to the throne of Austria 
in 1 617, is said to have taken a solemn vow that 
on receiving the imperial crown he would root out 
all heresy in his dominions. He had been educated 
by the Jesuits. His strong anti-Protestant senti- 
ments allied to a character, gloomy, fanatical and 
fierce, led him to inaugurate a most relentless per- 
secution. The Brethren were imprisoned, ban- 
ished, tortured. Then came the decisive battle of 
Weisenberg in 1620, which was a victory for the 
forces of unrighteousness. The extirpation of all 
the evangelicals was now resolved upon. The 
army of martyrs received many accessions. No- 
bles, knights and humbler witnesses for the truth 
fell beneath the executioner's axe. To harbor an 
evangelical pastor was a penal offence. Protestant 

32 



UNITAS FRATRUM 

Bibles were burned, estates confiscated and the pop- 
ulation of the province reduced from three millions 
to eight hundred thousand. More than thirty thou- 
sand families emigrated. Bohemia became a soli- 
tude and a waste, suffered as Spain did from the 
expulsion of the Moors and France from the loss 
of the Huguenots. By the close of the seventeenth 
century an observer would have said that Protes- 
tantism was dead in Bohemia. Publicly it was, but 
there was a remnant left called "The Hidden Seed." 
There Is always a holy remnant, a divine election 
in the world, or society would tumble into chaos, 
revert to anarchy and barbarism. The last bishop 
of this old Bohemian Church was Comensky or 
Comenius, a man of such great piety and zeal for 
education that he was even sought as a President 
for Harvard College.^ This man, driven with his 
flock from his native land, pauses a moment on the 
summit of the mountains which look down upon 

^ "That brave old man Johannes Amos Commenius, the 
fame of whose worth hath been trumpetted as far as more 
than three languages (whereof every one is endebted unto 
his Janua) could carry it was in deed agreed with all, by 
our Mr. Winthrop in his travels through the low coun- 
tries, to come over into Nezv England, and illuminate this 
Colledge and country, in the quality of a President. But 
the solicitations of the Swedish Ambassador, diverting 
him another way, that incomparable Moraviati became not 
an American." — Mather's Magnolia, Vol. II, Book IV. 
— "The History of Harvard-Colledge." 

33 



GNADENSEE " " 

the region he loved, and kneeUng there with his 
fellow exiles offers a fervent prayer that God would 
never suffer the light of divine truth to go out in 
those countries, but would there preserve a seed 
to serve him. The prayer was answered. Here 
and there a Bible was hidden in a cellar, in a hol- 
low log, in a dog-kennel, a secret which the head 
of the family knew but which he dared to make 
known to his children only on his death-bed. We 
are told that at one place on the borders of Hun- 
gary the farmers were wont every week on Satur- 
day to go over the boundary and bring back hay 
in their carts. It was not only hay they brought 
back, but their pastor concealed in the load, that he 
might preach to them on the Sabbath. 

"The Hidden Seed" was scattered by persecu- 
tion, a method of church extension since apostolic 
times. Christian David became the Moses of a 
new Exodus. With Huss, Jerome of Prague and 
Comenius he is one of the great names in Mora- 
vian history. He leads the exile bands over the 
borders into Protestant Saxony. They come to 
Herrnhut, "The Watch of the Lord." Here they 
rest, settle and colonize. As the Pilgrim Fathers 
knelt on the wintry strand at Plymouth and there 
beneath the ice-crusted pines rolled to heaven their 

34 



UNITAS FRATRUM 

psalms of praise, so these Moravian exiles, escaping 
Jesuit watchfulness and cruelty, would fall on their 
knees at Herrnhut and sing that hymn their ances- 
tors had sung a hundred years before. 

"Bless'd be the day when I must roam 
Far from my country, friends and home, 

An exile poor and mean; 
My fathers' God will be my guide, 
Will angel guards for me provide, 

My soul in danger screen; 
Himself will lead me to a spot, 
Where, all my cares and griefs forgot, 

I shall enjoy sweet rest; 
As pants for cooling streams the hart, 
I languish for my heavenly part. 

For God, my refuge blest." 

The saint in exile, the church in the wilderness, it 
has always been so from the time Abraham loaded 
his camels and journeying up the Mesopotamian 
plain left Ur with its culture and false gods behind. 
Religious people are nomads, children of the tent 
and altar. They go forth in pain but go in faith 
to find a land of promise. The story of Gnadensee 
cannot be written apart from this great movement 
behind it. These waves that glisten in the sun 
and ripple on its shore were stirred from afar. They 
are an influence even here of an old world faith 
and love. Carlyle and Emerson once meeting on 

35 



GNADENSEE 

the moors of Craigenputtoch, the former said, 
"Christ died on Calvary ; that brought us togeth- 
er." Is there any other reason why the Indian and 
the Moravian met on a Httle lake in the wild forest 
of North America? why Wequadnach the "place at 
the foot of the mountain" became Gnadensee the 
Lake of Grace? 



36 



A COUNT AND SAINT 



"JESU GEH VORAN" 

"Jesus, still lead on, 

Till our rest be won. 
And although the way be cheerless 
We will follow, calm and fearless ; 

Guide us by thy hand 

To our Fatherland. 

If the way be drear. 

If the foe be near, 
Let not faithless fears o'ertake us, 
Let not faith and hope forsake us ; 

For, through many a foe, 

To our home we go." 
— Nicolaus Ludivig Zinzcndorf (1700-1760). 



A COUNT AND SAINT 



In the summer of 1742 a man of distinguished 
appearance, with a piercing but benevolent eye, 
was making his way through the tangled forests of 
the New World. He was accompanied by his 
young and beautiful daughter. She seemed out of 
place in those dreadful wildernesses, woods and 
swamps, for she was of gentle blood, but her devo- 
tion to her father was almost worship and he had 
called her Benigna from her birth. They had trav- 
ersed the country from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 
to Esopus, now Kingston, on the Hudson, crossed 
the river at Rhinebeck and were on their way to 
an Indian village, a few miles from Wequadnach. 
They had often heard of the villages in this region 
and longed to visit them. The walls and turrets 
of their old world castle, the society of the court, 
the elegant leisure of letters and wealth were not 
so attractive as the forest huts of the Indians. 

39 



GNADENSEE 

Who was this distinguished traveler and what had 
brought him hither? Not trade or barter or to ac- 
quire a manor on the noble river he had crossed. 
His long journey across the ocean and through the 
wilderness was purely a religious one, that he 
might organize and direct missionary work in 
North America, unify and harmonize the churches 
there. It is hard for practical people to understand 
the dreamers and for the worldly spirit to believe 
in an unworldly motive, but it was a dream of ideal 
conditions on earth and a desire to realize them 
which had brought the traveler hither. Count 
Zinzendorf, for that was his name, is one of the 
finest characters in history. He is both count and 
saint. It is a rare combination, one not often 
found among men. Some are born saints and some 
become so. Cotton Mather in writing of Eliot 
quaintly says, "We are all of us compounded of 
those two things, the man and the beast; but so 
powerful was the man, in this holy person, that it 
kept the beast ever tyed with a short tedder, and 
suppressed the irregular calcitrations of it." Wheth- 
er this is a true description of the godly Eliot or a 
vivid setting forth of that incubus of original sin 
which was such an essential of Puritan theology is 
not certain, but Zinzendorf surely was not greatly 

40 



A COUNT AND SAINT 

troubled by these "irregular calcitrations." He was 
a born saint and manifested a piety which was pre- 
cocious in the extreme. He was a Joseph with 
spiritual dreams. His father dying when he was 
only six weeks old and his mother having married 
the second time, he was intrusted, while a mere 
child, to the spiritual care of his grandmother, the 
Baroness von Gersdorf, one of the best representa- 
tives of German pietism and a personal friend of 
Spener. She was a woman of superior mind, read 
the Bible in its original languages and composed 
hymns in German and Latin. It is no wonder that 
an impressionable nature like Zinzendorf's should 
receive from such a woman the stamp of a perma- 
nent spirituality. In the old castle of Gross-Hen- 
nersdorf, Saxony, one is still shown the window, 
out of which, when a boy, Zinzendorf tossed letters 
addressed to the Saviour, being sure his Lord would 
find and read them. Such a child reminds one of 
what the Scotch mother said, when the minister 
remarked that her boy was a miracle of divine 
grace. She was quite indignant and replied, "Na, 
na, you're all wrong aboot that. Sandy was aye 
sic a guid lad that divine grace had naething to do 
for him." 

At ten years of age Zinzendorf entered the Royal 
41 



GNADENSEE 

Paedagogium of Halle, then under the care of the 
pious Franckc. Here he remained six years and 
established circles for prayer, although he never 
allowed his religious activity to interfere with his 
literary studies. Next he joined the University of 
Wittenberg. An uncle who had charge of his edu- 
cation hoped that by withdrawing him from the 
religious atmosphere of Halle he might be turned 
toward some worldly position. Tlie young count 
was matriculated as a student of jurisprudence; 
civil promotion was sure to follow, but such a 
course was in the highest degree distasteful. Zin- 
zendorf longed to devote himself to Biblical stud- 
ies. He felt, as others so often have, a lack of spir- 
ituality, a dearth of Christian fellowship in univer- 
sity life. The Pandects of Justinian were not so 
interesting as the Mosaic Codes and the Pauline 
Epistles. Like Wesley, Whitefield and the Ox- 
ford Methodists he betook himself to prayer and 
practiced a rigorous self-denial. 

Over two years having been spent at Witten- 
berg, like all young men of rank and family he 
must complete his education by a tour of foreign 
travel. Nothing is more dangerous to the piety of 
a young man than transplanting it. Zinzendorf felt 
this danger and braced himself against it. What 

42 



A COUNT AND SAINT 

he wrote down is worthy of being read by all young 

tourists. "If the object of my being sent to France 

is to make me a man of the world, I declare that 

this is money thrown away; for God will, in his 

goodness, preserve me in the desire to live only 

for Jesus Christ." 

Standing in the gallery of paintings at Diisseldorf 

before a picture of his crucified Lord, on reading 

the inscription, 

"Hoc feci pro te, 
Quid facis pro me?" 

"This have I done for thee : 
What doest thou for me?" 

he was so deeply moved that his future years 
could not be spent in worldly pursuits. Like one, 
who, on the road lo Damascus, had seen a vision 
brighter than the Syrian noon, he was not dis- 
obedient. 

On his nineteenth birthday he arrived in Utrecht. 
Spending a few months in the study of law and 
medicine he v^'ent to France. His birth and rank, 
as count, gave him admission into the highest 
circles of Parisian society. He was much sought 
after, but he would neither gainble nor dance at 
court and when Cardinal de Noialles, the arch- 
bishop of Paris, tried to convert him to the Roman 

43 



GNADENSEE 

Catholic faith, the great prelate found it as difficult 
to change the young man's religion as others had 
to corrupt his morals. 

Ignatius Loyola once said to Francis Xavier, 
"Eternity alone, Francis, is sufficient for such a 
heart as yours; its kingdom of glory alone is 
worthy of it. Be ambitious, be magnanimous, but 
level at the loftiest mark." Nicolaus von Zinzen- 
dorf leveled at eternity. 

And now came one of those strange events 
which is a matter of sequence or Providential in- 
tent according to our philosophy and interpretation 
of life. Little bands of Bohemian exiles, driven 
from their fatherland by persecution, began to ar- 
rive at Berthelsdorf, in Upper Lusatia, an estate 
which the count had purchased of his grand- 
mother. Returning to the estate, while on his 
wedding journey, the count noticed, one evening, 
a light in a house which had been built during his 
absence. Inquiring what it meant he was told it 
was the house of some refugees from Moravia. 
He left the carriage, entered and gave them a 
hearty welcome. It was a turning-point in his life. 
Tlie count had found another bride. That evening 
interview had brought together a leader of men 
and an exiled people waiting for a champion and 

44 



A COUNT AND SAINT 

lover. No great movement ever yet was launched 
without some great man as its formative power. 
When God would set in motion a far-reaching 
work he has always had in training some great 
leader, a Moses, a Paul, a Zinzendorf. 

In 1737 Count Zinzendorf was ordained as bishop 
of the Moravian Church. He was not its founder 
but its resuscitator. He welded together the dis- 
cordant elements, fused the diverse nationalities. 
He directed and inspired missionary stations which 
were multiplying around the world. The burden 
of the work M^as its inspiration. He lavished his 
wealth and mortgaged his estates. Worldly hon- 
ors, the highest offices in the kingdom he sacri- 
ficed. He touched persons of divergent beliefs and 
varied nationality. Nobles, university professors, 
artisans and peasants, were all his friends. "The 
Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed," a society of 
young men formed in his student days at Halle, 
whose insignia was a ring with the motto, "None 
of us liveth to himself alone," grew under his care 
into a mighty tree. Count Zinzendorf made mis- 
takes, he had faults^ of temperament and disposi- 
tion, but the man who could write concerning one 

^ // n' appartient qu'aux grands homntes d'avoir de grands 
defauts. — La Rochefoucauld. 

45 



GNADENSEE 

of his journeys, "All the way to Riga I swam in, 
peace and joy in the Lord and walked on the shores 
of the Baltic with a delighted heart," is a saint. 
In a sermon at Herrnhut Zinzendorf once said, 
Ich hab' cine Passion, iind die est Er, nur Er. It was 
his life motto. He rests among the great men of 
the German race in the Walhalla near Ratisbon, 
and his epitaph has these fitting words, "He was 
ordained that he should bring forth fruit, and that 
his fruit should remain." 

To go back, in August, 1742, Count Zinzendorf 
and his daughter, the Countess Benigna, were near- 
ing Shekomeko, an Indian village in Duchess 
County, New York. It was the second of the 
count's Indian journeys. The other members of 
the party were Anna Nitschmann, Anthony Seif- 
fert and Conrad Weiser. They arrived at Sheko- 
meko on the sixteenth and received a warm wel- 
come from Brother Rauch, the missionary there, 
who had prepared a bark cottage for their recep- 
tion. The count declared it was the most agree- 
able dwelling he had ever inhabited. Here in this 
forest village the count organized a church of be- 
lieving Indians. Baptism was administered, regu- 
lations introduced and a church formed, which 
was the earliest Moravian church of converted In- 

46 




Count Zinzendorf 



A COUNT AND SAINT 

dians in North America. From this church as a 
center, rays of light penetrated the forest eastward, 
and streamed upon Wequadnach and the regions 
beyond. Count Zinzendorf himself did not come 
over to Wequadnach or visit Sharon. His visit was 
all too short even for the few miles that lay between, 
but the villages were in close touch and the work 
was one. The missionaries at Wequadnach or 
Gnadensee were all his personal friends ; with them 
he had discussed plans of work; and with one of 
them, David Bruce, he had crossed the ocean. 
Back of all this movement, as head and soul and 
purse, was Count Zinzendorf. 

Where Zinzendorf and Benigna crossed the 
Hudson is now, on either bank, one of the great 
Violet growing centers of the United States. From 
Poughkeepsie to Rhinebeck stretch acres of violet 
bloom and the air for miles is laden with the fra- 
grance. There are certain peculiarities of soil and 
a singularly crystalline atmosphere which make 
this locality unique in the prodigality and perfec- 
tion of the violet. It is the region of the old manor 
lands and the Moravian pilgrimages. As one fol- 
lows Count Zinzendorf and Benigna on their jour- 
ney through it he is reminded of the lines in Words- 
worth's Ode to Duty, 

47 



GNADENSEE 

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads; 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong 
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, 
are fresh and strong." 



48 



THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE 



"Hear a word that Jesus spake. 

Eighteen centuries ago. 

Where the crimson lilies blow 
Round the blue Tiberian lake. 
There the bread of life he brake, 

Through the fields of harvest walking 

With his lowly comrades, talking 

Of the secret thoughts that feed 

Weary hearts in time of need. 
Art thou hungry? Come and take." 

— "The Toiling of Felix," Henry van Dyke. 



THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE 



In the preceding chapters we have seen how the 
"dayspring from on high" visited the forest huts 
of Shekomeko and a church was organized on the 
arrival of Count Zinzendorf. It was "the church 
in the wilderness," the center of a new movement. 
Missionaries from Shekomeko now statedly visited 
Wequadnach. Mack, Senseman, Pyrlaeus and Post 
came to these villages at the foot of Indian Moun- 
tain. Who are these men with foreign names? It 
startles us to find indefatigable and intrepid souls 
from Germany pentrating the towns of New Eng- 
land, touring beyond this little mission at the foot 
of the mountain to visit the Indian settlements 
along the Housatonic. They go to Westenhuc, in 
Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Whitak near 
Salisbury, Pachgatgoch in Kent, and Potatik in 
Newtown. Their example is a silent rebuke to the 
English. Who are they? Some are from the hum- 
Si 



GNADENSEE 

bier classes, German peasants and artisans, but 
one of them, Pyrlaeus, was a graduate of Leip- 
zig and all were on fire with holy zeal. Their work 
at Wequadnach was not without results. The first 
convert to receive baptism was Kaupaas named 
Timothy by the Brethren. Like Epasnetus whom 
Paul calls the firstfruits of Achaia, he was the 
promise of a coming harvest and was baptized at 
Shekomeko, August 4th, 1742, The second con- 
vert was Moses, baptized in December of the same 
year, but in 1744, on the third of June, the first 
baptism occurred in Wequadnach itself and Martha, 
the second wife of Gideon, chief of the Wampa- 
noags of Kent, was the recipient. The mission was 
successfully launched. No one is able to tell just 
where the original house of worship was built. It 
was on the west shore somewhere and the Brethren 
gave it the same beautiful name which they had 
bestowed upon the lake. It was not a very durable 
structure. Quite a little congregation seems now to 
have been gathered at Gnadensee, but in 1744 per- 
secution broke out which greatly interfered with 
the mission. It was the time of the French and 
Indian War. The Brethren were accused of being 
secret allies of the French, Papists in disguise 
The absurdity of the charge is seen when one re- 

52 



THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE 

members that the bitterest trouble of the Mora- 
vians had always been their persecution by the Pa- 
pists. The account given in the second chapter of 
this book is one of the agreements of church his- 
torians and the sufficient refutation of such a 
charge. Yet it was made and persistently repeated. 
It was said that the missionaries intended to fur- 
nish firearms to the Indians with which they would 
fight against the English. The falsehood was 
widely spread and the whole region filled with ter- 
ror. In the archivjes of the Brethren's Church at 
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the author found a let- 
ter written by Gottlieb Biittner, missionary of the 
Brethren at Shekomeko, addressed to the Rev. 
Peter Pratt of Sharon, in which he assures him 
that the Indians are peaceable and meditate no 
hostility. It seems that the inhabitants of Sharon 
were so frightened that they had begun to arm. 
As a result of the persecution the missionaries 
were summoned to Poughkeepsie and required to 
take an oath; military service was demanded of 
them, both of which acts, be it remembered, were a 
violation of their religious principles. Measures 
were now passed by the Assembly of New York 
which were as unjust and cruel as the decrees of 
the famous Star Chamber, to escape which our 

53 



GNADENSEE 

fathers fled from Old England. One act required 
all suspicious persons to take the oath of allegi- 
ance. Another enjoined Moravians and vagrant 
teachers among the Indians to desist from further 
teaching or preaching and to leave the Province. 
The sherifif of Duchess County, assisted by three 
justices of the peace, closed the mission chapel at 
Shekomeko. Here in Connecticut the missionaries 
were summoned before the governor, though, be it 
said, they were honorably acquitted on examina- 
tion. But there was a different spirit in New York 
and it was so evident that the Colonial Assembly 
of that province aimed to destroy entirely the work 
of the Brethren among the Indians that Bishop 
Spangenberg had the missionaries all recalled to 
Bethlehem. 

As one goes over this controversy it is evident 
that it was not all a scare. Greed of land was at 
the bottom of this satanic work, and Demetrius 
raised again that old cry that his business was in 
danger. Converted Indians would not buy the 
white man's fire-water. 

The mission at Gnadensee naturally suffered in 
consequence of this persecution. Some of the In- 
dians w^nt to Bethlehem. Those who remained 
were as sheep having no shepherd. The Brethren 

54 



THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE 

continued to send native assistants but the mission 
perceptibly lan^ished and it is no wonder that 
some of the converts went back to their old vices. 

In 1749 the Parliament of Great Britain put an 
end to this unscrupulous legislation. George II 
was more enlightened than the Provincials in some 
things and we give him credit for it. By a special 
act of Parliament the United Brethren were now 
encouraged to settle in his majesty's colonies 
without taking an oath ; neither were they required 
to perform military service. Justice and vindica- 
tion had come at last. 

That the reader may see for himself the narrow- 
ness, injustice and vindictive animus of this Pro- 
vincial legislation the obnoxious act is here sub- 
mitted. 

"An Act for Securing of His Majestie's Government of 
New York. 

"Whereas, an Invasion hath been lately attempted against 
his Majestie's kingdom and government in favor of a pop- 
ish Pretender ; 

"Be it enacted — that it shall be lawful for any of the 
Judges of the Court of Common Pleas with any two Jus- 
tices of the Peace, to summon any person, whom they shall 
suspect to be disaffected to the government, to appear be- 
fore them to take the oath of Allegiance." 

The Society of Friends were excepted; an affir- 
mation that they were the faithful subjects of King 
George and detested the doctrines of the Pope was 

55 



GNADENSEE 

received instead of an oath ; but in reference to the 
Moravians we read : 

"And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid; 
that no Vagrant Preacher, Moravian or Disguised Papist 
should preach or teach either in public or private without 
first taking the Oaths appointed by this Act, and obtaining 
a License from the Governor or Commander-in-Chief for 
the time being, and every Vagrant Preacher, Moravian or 
Disguised Papist, that shall preach vvrithout taking such 
Oaths, or obtaining such License as aforesaid shall forfeit 
the sum of £40 with six months' Imprisonment without 
Bail or Mainprize, and for the second offence shall be 
obliged to leave the Colony, and if they do not leave this 
Colony or shall return, they shall suffer such punishment 
as shall be inflicted by the Justices of the Supreme Court, 
not extending to Life and Limb. 

"And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, 
that no person or persons whatsoever shall take upon them 
to reside among the Indians under the pretense of bring- 
ing them over to the Christian Faith, but such as shall be 
duly authorized so to do by License from the Governor or 
Commander-in-Chief for the time being, by and with the 
Advice and Consent of the Council, and every Vagrant 
Preacher, Moravian, Disguised Papist or any other person 
presuming to reside among and teach the Indians without 
such License as aforesaid, shall be taken up and treated as 
a person taking upon him to seduce the Indians from his 
Majestie's Interest and shall suffer such punishment as 
shall be inflicted by the Justices of the Supreme Court, not 
extending to Life and Limb. 

"Provided always and be it enacted by the Authority 
aforesaid, that nothing in this Act contained shall be con- 
strued to oblige the Ministers of the Dutch and French 
protestant reformed Churches, the Presbyterian Ministers, 
Ministers of the Kirk of Scotland, the Lutherans, the Con- 
gregational Ministers, the Quakers and the Anabaptists to 
obtain Certificates for their several places of public wor- 
ship already erected or that shall be hereafter erected 
within this Colony, anything in this Act to the Contrary 
notwithstanding. 

"This Act to be and remain of force from the publica- 
tion hereof for the term of one year and no longer." 

56 



A BARON AND COUNTESS AT 
THE LAKE 



"Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere, 

From yon blue heavens above us bent 
The gardener Adam and his wife 

Smile at the claims of long descent. 
Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 

'T is only noble to be good, 
Kind hearts are more than coronets, 

And simple faith than Norman blood." 

— "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," Tennyson. 



A BARON AND COUNTESS AT THE LAKE 



Although the mission at Gnadensee had lan- 
guished it had not died. Some of the Indians re- 
mained and a considerable colony came over from 
Shekomeko and joined them after the breaking up 
of the village there. The missionaries at Bethle- 
hem ever cast longing eyes toward this gem of the 
forest, these "brown hearts" as Spangenberg called 
them. In December 1748 John de Watteville and 
bis wife came in search of these sheep in the wil- 
derness. They were accompanied by Bishop Cam- 
merhof and Nathaniel Seidel. It was a delegation 
to inspect and revive the work. We cannot afiford 
to pass these people by with ignorant disdain or 
look at them through the squint of colonial prej- 
udice. Gnadensee has an illustrious pedigree.- 
John de Watteville was the son of a Lutheran pas- 
tor and a graduate of Jena. His original name was 
John Michael Langguth. Adopted by Frederick de 

59 



GNADENSEE 

Watteville, whose only child had died, by letters 
patent he was created a Baron of the German em- 
pire and took the name of his adopted father. As 
a young man he had also been the private secretary 
of Count Zinzendorf. As so often happens in this 
world the ruling passion developed a strong affinity 
between a great man's confidential clerk and his 
own beautiful daughter. It was inevitable that 
John de Watteville, Baron, and Count Zinzendorf's 
eldest daughter, the Countess Benigna, should fall 
in love, get married, and as they were both Chris- 
tians and interested in the same work it was natu- 
ral that they should visit a little lake in the forest 
which Benigna had almost reached when she came 
as a young girl with her father six years before. 
The Countess Benigna is therefore The Lady of 
the Lake^ and John de Watteville, who later was 
consecrated as Bishop and became one of the lead- 
ers in the Moravian Church, is the Baron of Gna- 
densee. Bishop Cammerhof was an alumnus of the 
University of Jena. His is a name renowned in 

* The author does not recommend that the tourist ask 
too many questions about the Countess of Gnadensee. He 
may be told that the Selectmen take such people as he to 
Middletown, but despite the density of local ignorance and 
a native, inborn prejudice against all titles of nobility, it 
remains true that Count Zinzendorf's daughter came here. 
Before Scott created his heroine of Loch Katrine, Benigna 
was The Lady of the Lake, the Countess of Gnadensee. 

60 



A BARON AND COUNTESS AT THE LAKE 

Moravian annals. He was a learned man, well ac- 
quainted with the church fathers and the history of 
philosophy. 

Nathaniel Seidel, the other member of the party, 
was a man of wide experience in church afifairs. In- 
timately associated with Bishops Spangenberg and 
Cammerhof, he later became a bishop himself. He 
journeyed on foot from Massachusetts to Maryland 
and preached the gospel to all sorts and condi- 
tions of men. His wife had been in intimate as- 
sociation with Count Zinzendorf and his coadju- 
tors. Surely this little delegation which had come 
to revive the work at Gnadensee were very consid- 
erable people. There was, there could be, no better 
society in the Colonies — and where in the world can 
we find it now? university graduates, bishops, no- 
bles, women of birth and quality, all moved by one 
great love for human souls — souls not the most at- 
tractive but the most needy. The old motto, No- 
blesse oblige, had found its interpretation. It could 
not fail that this visit should bear fruit. With 
great zeal the Brethren took up the work. They 
counselled, they exhorted, they comforted, they 
entreated. Those who had lapsed were won back ; 
new converts came forth and were baptized. The 
mission was revived but it needed some one on 
6i 



GNADENSEE 

the field permanently. Watteville and his friends 
returned to Bethlehem and reported. A synod of 
the Church was held, at which it was determined to 
reorganize the mission and David Bruce was com- 
missioned to undertake the work. 



62 



A WEQUADNACH LETTER 



"The epistolary form, says Bengel, is a preeminence of 
the Scriptures of the New Testament as compared with 
those of the Old. . . .The Prophets delivered oracles to 
the people, but the Apostles wrote letters to the brethren. 
... It is in its nature a more familiar communication, as 
between those who are, or should be, equals. . . . The 
form adopted in the New Testament combines the advan- 
tages of the treatise and the conversation. The letter may 
treat important subjects with accuracy and fulness, but it 
will do so in immediate connection with actual life. It is 
written to meet an occasion. It is addressed to particular 
states of mind. It breathes of the heart of the writer." — 
"The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament," 
Bernard. 



A WEQUADNACH LETTER 



"WecTiquadnach, February lo, 1749. 

"We, Abraham, Moses and Jacob, and all the brethren 
and sisters, salute the whole Church, and are very glad 
and thankful that the Church has cared for us again, vis- 
ited us, forgiven us all that has hitherto passed and sent 
somebody to instruct and teach us. For we know that 
through this forgiveness many of us have been helped to 
rights, and set upon our feet again. Therefore, we are 
glad, and salute the brethren and sisters at Bethlehem; 
therefore we brethren and sisters pray that our Saviour 
may wash us in his blood, and make us obedient from the 
bottom of our hearts; for we thought we should never 
more, in all our lives, have any one from the Brethren's 
church among us. We therefore desire our brethren and 
sisters at Bethlehem to pray for us. We will also pray to 
our Saviour with our whole hearts, and do our utmost to 
remain steadfast in the faith in his meritorious death. 

"Joshua's grandmother salutes him heartily, and is very 
glad that his sister was baptized at Bethlehem. And I am 
very glad that the missionaries show us the plain and 
straight way to our Saviour; and I salute Brother Joseph 
and mother Spangenberg; and we brethren and sisters wish 
that where the Brethren live we may live also; for, so long 
as we had no teachers, we could not say that we loved the 
Brethren ; but now we feel that we love them. Sarah sa- 
lutes Brother Joseph and Mother Spangenberg, Brother 
Cammerhofif and Sister Cammerhofif, and all the brethren 
and sisters at Bethlehem, Gnadenhuetten, Nazareth, and in 
all the churches. Our Sister Rachel does the like; our Sis- 
ter Abigail the like; Bartholomews mother the like; our 
Sister Miriam the like; our Sister Esther the like; 

"Brother Jephthah salutes the Brethren Joseph, Cammer- 

65 



GNADENSEE 

hof, John, Nathaniel, Father Nitschmann, and the whole 
church, and recommends himself to their prayers, for he 
is poor in body and soul. 

"And we, the rest of the brethren, are indeed poor, and 
cannot say much ; yet we will constantly tell Brother Bruce 
the state of our hearts; then our brethren and sisters at 
Bethlehem will know how we stand to Jesus. 

"Jephthah salutes also Philippus and all his children. 
Brother Moses salutes Brother Joseph and wife. Brother 
Cammerhof and wife, Brother John and wife, and Na- 
thaniel, and kisses them heartily, and the whole church at 
Bethlehem and Gnadenhuetten. 

"I salute my son Jonathan, and pray that he may see this 
letter, that he may know what we have made out. Sarah 
salutes Jonathan and Anna; and we shall be glad if he 
comes back again; and Sarah is very glad that Jonathan 
again stands on a good ground. 

"Moses salutes Jonathan, and rejoices much over him, 
and says : The words of our Saviour shall always be a light 
to us. 

"And we salute the brethren and sisters from the Dela- 
ware nation, and were very glad to hear of the grace our 
Saviour has bestowed upon them ; and we say to them : 
Let us dwell together at the pierced feet of Jesus ; let us 
abide there; and although we have never seen one another 
with our eyes, we shall nevertheless feel that we are one ; 
and, when the Lord comes, then shall we see and meet one 
another. 

"Esther salutes Jonathan and Anna, and all the sisters, 
and is sorry that she could not go with them, for her 
mother hindered her. But she hopes a time may come 
when she can visit them. Brother Jephthah's daughter, 
who is sick, salutes her sister in Gnadenhuetten, and 
thinks she will not live; prays, therefore, heartily to be 
baptized. 

"Abraham, Moses and Jacob." 

Tliis letter quoted here rightly follows the visit 
of the Bethlehem delegation. Written by Indian 
converts it expresses their joy on the arrival of 
Bruce and has the charm and naivete of apostol- 
ic Christianity. Addressed to the leaders of the 

66 



A WEQUADNACH LETTER 

Moravian Church in Pennsylvania, it is a list of 
salutations and names, poor Indian names ! They 
glint across our vision like meteors in the midnight 
sky, appear for a moment and then vanish forever; 
yet it is a roll more glorious than the blazoned 
records of heraldry, Heckewelder's Catalogue of 
Baptisms has supplied a few scanty facts about 
these believers at Wechquadnach. 

Some wandered to the Moravian settlements in 
Pennsylvania; one was buried in the potter's field 
at Philadelphia. Others have the short and simple 
annals of the poor. 

They left this letter, which, like the lake they 
loved, is a gem in the literature of the Christian 
Church ; then sank from sight like a stone falling 
into the water. It refutes forever that brutal calum- 
ny of a certain American general who said that the 
only good Indian is a dead Indian. It is the new 
apologetic we need, a sample of those evidences 
which warm the heart and keep faith alive ; for if 
divine grace can soften and make loving that fero- 
cious Indian nature which caused the early mothers 
of New England to clasp their children in dread as 
the warwhoop of the savage rose on the startled 
air, then there are no limits to its power. 

The letter is a most interesting study in mis- 
67 



GNADENSEE 

sions and spiritual therapeutics and shows the far- 
reaching influence of the apostle Paul. We can 
read in the Revision now, I am debtor both to the 
Greeks and to the Mohicans. In form it is the six- 
teenth chapter of Romans. The saints at Gnaden- 
see salute us. Is it too much to say that without 
this letter the history of the Christian Church 
would be unwritten and its literature incomplete? 
If the claim be extravagant certainly the Lake of 
Grace has a right to its unique and beautiful name. 



68 



THE HEART OF BRUCE 



"Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love. Though 
men should rend your heart, let them not embitter or 
harden it. We win by tenderness, we conquer by forgive- 
ness. O strive to enter into something of that large celes- 
tial charity which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and 
which even the overbearing world cannot withstand for- 
ever ! Learn the new commandment of the Son of God, 
not to love merely, but to love as he loved. Go forth in 
this spirit to your life duties; go forth, children of the 
cross, to carry everything before you, and win victories 
for God by the conquering power of a love like his." — 
Frederick W. Robertson. 



THE HEART OF BRUCE 



The coming of Bruce was in order that the new 
life in the resurrected mission might be a perma- 
nent growth. He was accompanied by Frederick 
Post. Post was to assist in the reorganization but 
Bruce was to remain as resident missionary and 
Hve in the house on the lake. On the 3rd of Feb- 
ruary, 1749, these two men set out "recommended 
by the brethren" like Paul and Silas of old. Post 
returned to Bethlehem on the 28th of February 
and said he had found the Indians glad to receive 
their new teacher and anxious to hear from him 
the words of life. As the mission at Gnadensee 
claims Bruce as its patron saint, his death in the 
midst of successful labor being a tender and holy 
memory that lingers around the lake, it is proper 
here to give a brief sketch of his life. 

David Bruce was born in Edinburgh. Scotland. 
The year of his birth is unknown ; parish regis- 

71 



GNADENSEE 

ters have been searched in vain for this date. He 
was originally a Scotch Presbyterian, but for some 
reason was led to choose the milder creed and 
gentler ways of the Moravians. He came to this 
country in 1741, and as he crossed the ocean with 
Count Zinzendorf there is a direct and close con- 
nection between the mission at Gnadensee and 
that great soul. For seven years and a half Bruce 
was a travelling evangelist. Although an enrolled 
member of the first Brethren's church in America 
he was not content to be in the "Home Congre- 
gation," but belonged to a class of young men 
called "The Pilgrims." They were itinerants and 
summons-men. Bethlehem had its Friedenshiitten 
(Tents of Peace), but they were no place for Bruce 
whose soul was "pregnant with celestial fire," 
whose eyes were ever on the regions beyond. 

Bruce chose for his wife a daughter of Stephen 
Benezet of Philadelphia. She belonged to an ex- 
cellent and famous Huguenot family and a few 
months after her marriage accompanied her hus- 
band and Count Zinzendorf on his first visit to the 
Indian country. 

Returning to Bethlehem, an old record informs 
us that Bruce labored as a carpenter in the neces- 
sities of the new settlement. According to the 

72 



THE HEART OF BRUCE 

simple faith of the Brethren, to preach or work 
with the hands was equally for the glory of God. 
Next, in 1743, we find him in Philadelphia. The 
Brethren had established a church there. It was 
the headquarters for several evangelists and their 
families. Bruce preached the gospel at different 
places in the city, then seems to have removed to 
Bethlehem, whence he itinerated to the Indians of 
Eastern Pennsylvania. 

The return of Bishop de Watteville from We- 
quadnach now brought that call which opened 
up a field of rare promise here at the foot of Indian 
Mountain. Bruce began his labors at Wequadnach 
with great zeal and success. After a few weeks 
Bishop Cammerhof arrived from Bethlehem to 
baptize the Indian converts, who greatly desired 
the Christian ordinances. Cammerhof in his jour- 
nal says : "We first came to Abraham's hut. Sarah, 
Abraham's wife, had spied us from afar, through 
a crevice in the hut, and hurried out to meet us, 
full of joy, receiving us right warmly, with many 
tears of love. Very soon came John, who had 
lately visited Bethlehem, Miriam, Abigail, Jeph- 
thah, Jacob, and several others, also of the unbap- 
tized and all rejoiced exceedingly to see us. John 
ran directly to call Brother Bruce, who was in the 

n 



GNADENSEE 

house on Gnadensee ; and, on his coming to us, 
Brother Bruce rejoiced more than all, not hav- 
ing expected us so soon." 

No less than twenty new converts were bap- 
tized, and just before the bishop and his assistant 
left, the celebration of the Lord's Supper took place 
in the mission house on the shore. The Lake of 
Grace was now the Lake of the Holy Sacrament, 
only that is a Catholic designation which a Mora- 
vian would never use. There was a deep work of 
grace here in the souls of these Indian Brethren, 
with promise of other and richer harvests. Bruce 
labored on with his flock, his feet on earth, his 
soul in heaven, until the 6th of July, when he fell ill 
and after three days of suffering passed away. In 
January, 1749, he began his work; in July he had 
finished it. He died among his converts. The 
diary of the Bethlehem congregation gives the fol- 
lowing information concerning his departure. 

"July 13th. Toward evening the two Indian 
brethren, Samuel and Gottlob, arrived from Pach- 
gatgoch with the intelligence that Br. Bruce had 
been lying seriously indisposed in the mission 
house at Wechquadnach already for a week. It 
was deemed advisable to have a brother visit him, 
and accordingly Br. Post was despatched without 
delay. 74 



THE HEART OF BRUCE 

"July 22d. At noon Moses's son came from 
Wechquadnach with letters from Br. Post, stating 
that on his arrival Br. Bruce was no more, having 
departed on the 9th inst., a short time after Samuel 
and Gottlob had left for Bethlehem. On the 6th 
inst., after his return from Westenhuc, or Wanna- 
quatiksk, writes Br. Post, our brother was taken ill, 
and although he suflfered much pain, was in a 
happy frame of mind. Shortly before his release, 
a neighbor called to see him, and on asking him 
how he did, Bruce replied, 'Not well !' 'But you 
are prepared to go into the heavenly fatherland,' 
added the other. 'Yes!' he answered, 'I shall soon 
see my Saviour.' Our Indian brethren, Moses and 
Joshua, were his constant attendants during his ill- 
ness. A short time before his end, taking their 
hands into his own, he pressed them to his heart, 
and entreated them to hold fast to the Saviour. 
Some English neighbors assisted our Indians in 
making preparations for interring his remains. 
The former, to whom he had endeared himself, 
procured linen, and the body was laid out in white. 

The funeral service was attended by many friends. 
Joshua, son of Gideon of Pachgatgoch, delivered a 
discourse in Indian, reminding his hearers of all 
that their teacher had told them of the Saviour's 

75 



GNADENSEE 

love, and many were the tears that moistened the 

dark cheeks of that mourning and bereft assembly. 

The body was then put on two canoes, and carried 

over 'Gnaden See,' the brethren and friends taking 

their way along the bank to the place of burial, 

amidst the singing of hymn tunes. At the grave 

Br. Gideon offered a prayer, and thus was buried 

the first of our number among the hills and valleys 

of New England." So ends the beautiful story. 

If Tennyson in the Idylls of the King touches 

our heart by the story of Elaine "the lily maid of 

Astolat," whose pure love consumed her soul to 

death, and our eyes have a mist of tears as we 

read of how 

"the dead 
Oar'd by the dumb, went upward with the flood," 

is there not the meed of human tears for a story 
that is true, as these dark children of the forest 
robe the teacher whom they loved, not "in white 
samite, mystic, wonderful," but in the best their 
poverty could find, and laying him tenderly in their 
canoes rowed him over the Lake of Grace to their 
burial ground upon its shore? As the Indian 
Brother stood there and offered his prayer broken 
by sobs, can we doubt that the angels bent low to 
listen or that He whose death is the story of an in- 

76 



THE HEART OF BRUCE 

finite grace did not move to greet a kindred spirit 
as it rose from the shining levels of Gnadensee? 

What is the highest attainable, the utmost man 
can do : climb the Matterhorn, find a farther North 
than Nansen, hold Spion Kop? Rather is it dying 
like Xavier on the pestilential beach of China, 
worn out with labors and vigils, the fever in his 
blood, but the light of a coming glory kindling 
in his eye ; rather is it dying as this man did here 
on the shore of Gnadensee, with no hope or 
thought of mention, without wife or child to cheer 
him, dying among his Indian converts and with 
the peace of God transfiguring his face. It is re- 
lated of Robert Bruce, the hero and deliverer of 
Scotland, that, after his death, his heart was car- 
ried by one of his trusty soldiers in a leathern case. 
In battle this was always flung into the ranks of the 
foe, whereupon the gallant Scots rushed forward 
to its rescue, shouting, "On! on, thou heart of 
Bruce, where'er thou goest we will follow thee." 
In Melrose Abbey they still show the stone be- 
neath which 't is said that heart is buried. 

As we read of this other Bruce, a soldier in a 
nobler cause, shall we not catch the zeal and in the 
deepening battle peal the cry. "On ! on, thou heart 
of Bruce, where'er thou goest we will follow thee"? 

77 



GNADENSEE 

The following extract from Loskiel's History of 
the Mission of the United Brethren among the In- 
dians in North America, is a fitting monograph 
with which to close this chapter: 

"Brother David Bruce was now appointed to the care of 
the Christian Indians at Schaticook and Wequadnock, who, 
since the forementioned visit of the bishop, had formed a 
regular settlement. He resided chiefly in a house at We- 
quagnock, belonging to the brethren called Gnadensee 
(Lake of Grace), but sometimes resided at Schaticook, 
whence he paid visits to Westenhunk by invitation of the 
chief of the Mohikan Nation, sowing the seeds of the gos- 
pel wherever he came, but as he was not ordained, Bishop 
Camerhoff, with brother Beyold went again to Wequad- 
nock to strengthen the brethren and to administer the sac- 
raments there. Twenty Indians were added to the church 
by baptism. Brother Bruce remained in this station till 
his happy departure out of time, which, to the great grief 
of the Indian congregation, took place this year. He was 
remarkably cheerful during his illness, and his conversa- 
tion edified all who saw him. Perceiving that his end ap- 
proached, he called the Indian brethren present to his bed- 
side, and pressing their hands to his breast, besought them 
fervently to remain faithful unto the end, and immediately 
fell asleep in the Lord. His funeral was committed to one 
of the assistants, who delivered a powerful discourse upon 
the solemn occasion to the company present, among whom 
were many white people, who had often heard our late 
brother's testimony of the truth, with blessing." 



78 



APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 



"The Church of Christ, that he hath hallowed here 
To be his house, is scattered far and near, 
In North and South, and East and West abroad; 
And yet in earth and heaven, through Christ her Lord, 
The Church is one. 

One member knoweth not another here, 
And yet tbeir fellowship is true and near; 
One is their Saviour, and their Father one ; 
One Spirit rules them, and among them none 
Lives to himself." 

— Spangenberg. 



APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 



The death of Bruce was a great loss but it re- 
sulted in a widening of the sphere and influence of 
the work. A request now came from the whites 
that a brother might be sent to preach them the 
gospel also. In May, 1752, a letter was sent to 
Bethlehem reiterating the request, in consequence 
of which Brother Abraham Reinke was sent out in 
July of the next year on a tour of visitation. In a 
sojourn of eight weeks he preached twenty times 
to large audiences. His appointments were at Sal- 
isbury and Sharon, Connecticut, in the "Oblong," 
"Nine Partners" and at Livingston's Manor in 
Duchess County, New York. There is a letter in 
the archives of the Bethlehem Church signed by 
thirty-four of the settlers around the Lake of 
Grace in which they request that Mr. Reinke be 
sent again to settle among them, or if that may not 
be, that some one else from the United Brethren 

81 



GNADENSEE 

may come, whom they will support as their minis- 
ter. The field as an Indian mission distinctively 
was abandoned in 1753, but it was cultivated as a 
home mission field much longer. Other brethren 
succeeded Rcinke, one of the last of whom was 
Joseph Powell. As he shares with Bruce the honor 
of the work in this region a brief biography is sub- 
mitted. 

Joseph Powell was not a missionary to the In- 
dians but had done the work of an itinerant evan- 
gelist for thirty-two years in different parts of the 
country ; had even gone to the West Indies. He 
was born in Shropshire, England, in 1710. As a 
young man he became acquainted with the United 
Brethren through Wesley and Whitefield. His 
wife, Mary Pritchard, although quite worldly in 
her early years, was converted while attending a 
love feast of the Brethren at Oxford. She proved 
herself later to be just the person for the wife 
of an evangelist. Tliey sailed from England on 
March 19th, 1742, with that body of immigrants 
known in Moravian history as "The First Sea Con- 
gregation." They reached Philadelphia on June 
7th and after a few weeks' stay went to Bethlehem. 

Of Powell's subsequent history it may be said 
that he led the life of an evangelist even more fully 

82 



APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 

than Bruce; his travels were more extended and 
he was an ordained minister. He labored in east- 
ern Pennsylvania, on Staten Island, at Dansbury 
near the Delaware Water Gap, on Carroll's Manor 
in Maryland and at various stations in New Eng- 
land. Six years of his life were spent in Jamaica 
preaching the gospel to negro slaves. His wife, 
who was his constant companion in all these jour- 
neys, died in Bethlehem, May 6, 1774. 

Powell was now in his sixty-third year and bowed 
low by this terrible sorrow, but he felt it better 
to die working than to die from grief. His spirit 
longed for service. He whose life had been a rov- 
ing mission set out for the "Bruce-place," which 
he longed to see. 

On arrival he rapidly gained the love of the 
people; a church was formed in what is now North 
East Center. His work gave promise of rich and 
mellow fruitage, but he was only permitted to labor 
for four months and then was called to join the 
beloved wife awaiting him above. Literally he had 
obeyed his Master's voice, had gone "over moun- 
tain and plain and sea." His last days saw the sun- 
set gild the dark crowns of Indian Mountain and 
kiss with gentle radiance the lake at its foot. He 
died peacefully. The lonely wanderer had found 

83 



GNADENSEE 

the "Bruce-place" at last, but it was not the one 
upon the shore of Gnadensee. 

Alike in spirit and aim, in the brevity and saint- 
liness of their ministry here, buried on opposite 
sides of the lake they loved, with names carved on 
the same monument, let the arbutus of the Litch- 
field Hills and the violets of Duchess County keep 
their memory fragrant. 

Sometimes we despair for our fellow men. Tlie 
low-lying clouds of greed settle down over human 
life; the atmosphere is worldly; we cannot see in 
the gathering gloom and our ideals are lost. We 
are like Matthew Arnold standing on the cliffs of 
Dover and mourning that the sea of faith is at its 
ebb and draws with melancholy roar down the 
naked shingles of the world. It is then that we 
need to recall the names graven on a monument 
that stands alone out in a field by the Lake of 
Grace and look up for their symbols in the sky. 

Joseph Powell ministered to a congregation of 
Puritan Dissenters and Independents. The Mora- 
vian Church adheres to the episcopate which it re- 
ceived from the Waldenses, goes back to Metho- 
dius and Cyril, valuing highly its apostolic suc- 
cession, but it is a union church working with all 
those who would accomplish the high priestly 

84 



APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 

prayer of our Lord and who by their fruits bear 
witness to the spirituaHty of their Hves. It is idle to 
dwell on mere titular rights. The grace of God 
is not a monopoly, not an antiquated claim but an 
experience and a life. There is an imposition of 
irresistible hands.' External authority, methods of 
administration, although they may bind, cannot 
destroy the liberty of the Spirit. As the tide fills 
every creek and inlet at its flood, covers with its 
sapphire waters the hideous mud and garbage of 
the harbor, so the great ocean of love obliterates 
our petty barriers and distinctions. They whose 
lives and sacrifices have been the costliest offering 
man can bring, are the true Church of Christ on 
earth and in line with "the glorious company of 
the apostles." 

In Mr. Newton Reed's Early History of Amenia 
there is this statement: 

"After the dispersion of the Indians, one of the Mo- 
ravian missionaries — Rev. Joseph Powell — ministered to a 
Congregation of the early settlers at the station in Amenia, 
near Indian Pond, where he died in 1774. He was buried 
there with some of his people, on the field of his labors, in 
the burying ground of the brethren, near their house of 

^ Tactual succession as a theory of the validity of holy 
orders is sometimes repulsive even when it can be made 
out. In the Armenian Church the ecclesiastics still use 
the mummied hand of their great saint, Gregory the Il- 
luminator, in the consecration of their chief Bishop. 

85 



GNADENSEE 

worship. . . . This ground, consecrated by missionary work 
and Christian burial, is on the farm' of Col. Hiram Clark, 
in the present town of Northeast, not far east of his house 
and on the west side of Indian Pond." 

It should be added that the only indication at 
present that there was ever a burial place here is 
the presence of some mutilated stones built into 
or lying upon a wall near the orchard, 

* The local antiquarian will find it of interest to make a 
visit to the Hiram Clark farm. Just across the highway in 
an apple orchard is the site of the Moravian cemetery. 
The grave of Powell is here, though the slate stone has 
been removed and is now in the keeping of the Moravian 
Historical Society. The mission house or church stood 
near by. By all means the visitor should walk down to the 
lake. Not only is the view an attraction but a cove of 
lilies looks across the water to the southeast. It was from 
this spot or very near it that the body of Bruce was rowed 
across in Indian canoes to the place of burial. 



86 



THE MONUMENT 



"For of illustrious men the whole earth is the sepulcher; 
and not only does the inscription upon columns in their 
own land point it out, but in that also which is not their 
own there dwells with every one an unwritten memorial 
of the heart, rather than of a material monument." — Thu- 
cydides. 



THE MONUMENT 



"Our Br. Bruce was much beloved by both 
whites and Indians, who deplore his early loss. The 
former desire a brother to preach them the Gos- 
pel, and have permitted me to put a stone on Br. 
David's grave, and then inclose it with a fence." 
So wrote Brother Christian Froehlich in 1752. 
That stone on "Br. David's grave" has had a 
strange history. Human thoughtlessness has been 
more unkind than the elements. The grave, long 
neglected, wasd ploughed with the rest of the field, 
and the mutilated and defaced stone built into a wall 
until at last a farmer took it away and kept it in 
his house. Here is what was found. 

Br 

nburgh in 
d, minister of the 
ethrens' Church 
g the Indians 
parted 1749. 

Loskiel, in his History, has restored the inscrip- 
tion. 89 



GNADENSEE 

"David Bruce 
from Edinburgh in Scotland 
a minister of the Brethren's Church among the Indians, 
departed 1749." 

Powell's grave fared somewhat better. The 
stone was removed by a Mr. Clarke to insure its 
preservation and set into a neighboring wall. For 
nearly a hundred years the graves of these two 
missionaries were uncared for and almost passed 
from human recollection. 

The world is ruthless with our tender associa- 
tions. It is a great, engulfing sea to drown our 
sentiment and romance. It overwhelms them like 
Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen. Even now with 
all our schools and culture and Colonial organiza- 
tions it is only the thoughtful few who feel the 
touch of the past and hand down its great inspira- 
tions. A Moravian on Broadway would be stared 
at and arrested by the police. They would not like 
his garb or his morals. The eyes of our mighty 
growing country are set on the future, not the past, 
yet we need the past to steer by more than we 
know. 

That fence around "Br. David's" grave has long 
since disappeared, become a wood-pile, old iron, 
ashes — who knows what? Of the mission house not 
one rotten sill remains and no tradition or histor- 

90 



THE MONUMENT 

ical society can point out its exact location. All 
through the glorious summer weather splendid 
equipages whirl past Gnadensee, clouds of dust roll 
up, and the elegant people seem to say, "See ! this 
is our Appian Way." But the liveried coachman 
does not stop ; there is no stile by the roadside 
and no well worn path to "Br. David's" grave. The 
votive wreaths of May are not for him. 'T is the 
"Sea of the World's Forgetting" and 't will be so 
with us all. 

"The tide of life's river is setting, 

And will not turn again, 
Toward the sea of the world's forgetting, 

Where go the lives of men. 

"Though memory, backward winging. 

Longs for our childhood's glee, 
Yet the wind in the cordage singing 

Still drives us toward the sea. 

"Shall we waste the hours in sighing 

For the sources far away, 
When the ocean surf is crying 

And the moments will not stay? 

"Alas, for our vain regretting! 

Why should we dread the deep? 
For the sea of the world's forgetting 

Is the peace that God doth keep." 

For nearly a hundred years, as we have said, this 
"Sea of the World's Forgetting" rolled over these 
men, their names and the place of their labor, until 

91 



GNADENSEE 

the Moravian Historical Society determined that 
they should have a memorial and a monument. A 
committee was appointed to take the matter in 
charge. Permission was obtained from the owner 
of the land lo erect a monument. Orders were 
placed and two marble obelisks designed, one for 
Shekomeko and the other for Wequadnach. The 
Wequadnach monument was set up a short time be- 
fore its dedication, the remains of Bruce having 
been exhumed and placed beneath it. The bones 
and skeleton were found to be in an almost per- 
fectly sound condition, not recumbent as with us 
but in a sitting posture according to the Indian 
mode of burial. 

It was not deemed best to remove the remains 
of Powell but to replace the old tombstone and 
guard the sanctity of his grave. As the church 
and mission house had both stood on the west side 
of Gnadensee it seemed as though the associations 
of the spot should not be forgotten or obliterated. 
Accordingly, it was decided to hold a service at 
this locality and then proceed across the water in 
boats to the southeastern shore, as the Indians did 
when they rowed the body of their beloved Bruce 
across the lake for burial. A delegation consist- 
ing of the dignitaries in the Moravian Church with 

92 



THE MONUMENT 

choir and trombonists had charge of the services. 
A day was fixed for the dedication. There are a 
few Hving witnesses who can still remember it. It 
is the most important event in the history of the 
town. Let a Moravian pen describe that scene. 
It was October 6, 1859: 

"On the conclusion of the brief ceremony" (the ceremony 
at the grave of Joseph Powell), "the party set out for the 
grave of David Bruce, on the east side of Indian Pond 
in the town of Sharon, Conn. It was deemed unsafe to 
cross the water in boats. Some of the number followed 
the footpath along the base of tlie mountain ; others, driv- 
ing, took the road that leads around the right shore to the 
outlet, and to the farm house of Mr. Andrew Lake. Here 
the procession formed as on the previous occasions, and, 
amid the music of trombones, moved to the Wechquad- 
nach burial ground, and to the monument that bears the 
name of those who, a century ago, labored in this vicinity 
among Indians and whites. 

"On approaching the meadow in which the ceremonies 
were to be held, there were indications of a numerous 
gathering. Along the Sharon road, carriage was seen fol- 
lowing carriage, and already the lane and orchard near 
by were full of vehicles. Hundreds of human beings were 
collected about the monument, and hundreds collected 
along the ledges and sunny slopes with which the rugged 
spot is diversified. It was altogether a scene of varied 
forms, and coloring, and life, that bespoke an extraordi- 
nary occasion, and has left an indelible impression on the 
minds of all who witnessed it. The wind blew fresh from 
the north, whirling the withered leaves from the tree-tops, 
and roughening the bosom of the lake with white-crested 
waves ; and so boisterous did it grow, that it was inex- 
pedient to assemble immediately about the monument. A 

93 



GNADENSEE 

southerly slope near by afforded protection from the ele- 
ments, and here the worshippers gathered to recall the la- 
bors of the dead, and to meditate on the bliss which is the 
portion of those who have died in the Lord. Tier on tier 
of anxious listeners were seated to the very top of the lit- 
tle amphitheatre, and among these were swarthy faces, a 
handful of survivors of the doomed race that once was 
lord of the soil. They were Sharon Indians, who had come 
to hear what had transpired when their forefathers dwelt 
along the borders of Indian Pond. Half-way down the ac- 
clivity stood the speakers and the trombonists, fronting the 
rest of the seventeen hundred spectators, who, standing be- 
low in a compact crowd, or seated in wagons, listened with 
deep attention to the services which had called them to- 
gether." 

Bishop Wolle read the Easter Morning Litany. 
The Rev. Edmund De Schweinitz dehvered a care- 
fully prepared historical address and the congrega- 
tion sang from the Moravian Hymnal: 

"How sweetly these our brethren sleep. 

Enjoying endless peace; 
The grave, wherein their Saviour lay, 

Is now their resting place. 

"Naught can disturb these heirs of life, 

All earthly cares are fled. 
To be with Christ was their desire. 

And now they're perfected." 

If it were in keeping with our age for a lake to 
have a patron saint, Gnadensee should be called 
St. David's Lake. In the middle ages this grave by 
its shore would have been a shrine, a lofty cathe- 

94 



THE MONUMENT 

dral would tower above it, through whose aisles 
and arches would swell the anthem, the daily ma- 
tins and vespers, Moravian faith builds charac- 
ters, not cathedrals ; it canonizes no saints ; its rows 
of flat stones with plainest inscriptions attest the 
democracy of death. As it has made an exception 
for once, let us at least preserve the monument 
from vandalism/ 

The inscription reads as follows: 
[North Side.] 

Joseph Powell, 

A Minister Of The Gospel 

In The 

Church Of The United Brethren, 

Born, 1710, 

Near Whitechurch, Shropshire, England, 

Died, Sept. 23, 1774, 

At Sichem In The Oblong,' 

Duchess Co., N. Y. 

" By a recent purchase the southern and eastern shore of 
the Lake of Grace has become the property of Dr. Wil- 
liam B. Coley and Mr. George B. Agnew of New York 
City. This insures the preservation of the natural beauty 
along the lake front and will protect the Monument from 
those who would deface it. 

' "The Oblong" mentioned on the Monument is that strip 
of territory fifty miles long and less than two miles wide 
which was ceded by Connecticut to New York in 1731 in 
exchange for the "Horseneck" on the Sound or "The 
Equivalent" as it was called in the land titles of that pe- 
riod. By this transfer Connecticut gained some good har- 
bors which were greatly coveted, but lost that western ex- 
tension by which Massachusetts now overlaps. "The 
Equivalent" ceded by New York embraced the present 
towns of Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan and Darien. 

95 



GNADENSEE 

[South Side.] 

David Bruce, 

A Minister Of The Gospel 

In The 

Church Of The United Brethren, 

From 

Edinburgh, Scotland, 

Died July 9, I749> 

At The 

Wechquadnach Mission, 

Duchess Co., N. Y. 

[East Side.] 

'How Beautiful Upon The Mountains 
Are The Feet Of Him That Bringeth 
Good Tidings, That Publisheth Peace; 
That Bringeth Good Tidings Of Good; 
That Publisheth Salvation." 



— Isaiah 52 : 7. 



[West Side.] 

Erected By The 

Moravian Historical Society, 

October 6, 1859. 



96 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 



"Nicht Jerusalem 
Sondern Bethlehem 
Aus dir kommet, was mir frommet." 

— Hymn Book of 1735. 

"The place having as yet no name, it so happened, that 
on Christmas Eve we called to mind the birth of our Sav- 
iour, and as there was a thin partition-wall between our 
dwelling-room and the cow- and horse-stable, the 'Ordi- 
nary' in the tenth hour of the night went over to the stable 
and commenced to sing with great fervency of spirit 

" 'Not Jerusalem — 
No, from Bethlehem 
We receive life and salvation.' 

"And thus on Christmas Eve, 1741, this new settlement 
received the name of Bethlehem." — John Martin Mack. 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 



As the reader has followed the story thus far it 
is very evident that what has given Gnadensee its 
unique importance was an influence emanating 
from Bethlehem. The story of the Mission is pre- 
served in the archives of the church there, and all 
the missionaries came from Bethlehem. It was 
the Antioch of this missionary movement. 

The colonizers of Pennsylvania were idealists 
and reformers. First came William Penn, who 
founded the city of Brotherly Love and caused 
the Society of Friends to take root in the soil of 
the New World. Next was the Pantisocracy of 
the Lake Poets. Attracted by the euphony of the 
word Susquehanna, Coleridge, Southey and Lov- 
ell planned to plant on the banks of that river an 
Eden of equal rule, the haunt of the muses, the 
home of lovers — a delightful dream soon to be 
shattered by a prosaic world which insists that 

L.cfC. 99 



GNADENSEE 

poets, like other people, shall earn their bread and 
pay their bills. 

Between Penn's Philadelphia which succeeded 
and Coleridge's Pantisocracy which failed, came the 
Missionary Commune of the Moravian, in many 
respects a copy of that apostolic Christianity which 
succeeded Pentecost. 

The home of this New World economy and 
missionary propaganda was Bethlehem. The de- 
scendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are so famiUar 
with the story of the Mayflower and the settlement 
at Plymouth that they do not sufficiently credit an- 
other movement equally heroic. Other colonists 
beside those who came from Old England have 
moulded our cosmopolitan country. There are sec- 
tions of Pennsylvania thoroughly American, but 
neither English nor Puritan ; our new England 
speech is not the mother tongue, and one cannot 
understand what is said. There is a German pa- 
tois, a Moravian lineage. 

We have seen before how the Moravian move- 
ment had behind it great leaders, Huss, Comenius, 
Zinzendorf, and now another appears in David 
Nitschmann, the "Founder of Bethlehem." Born 
in 1676, in the valley of Zauchenthal, Austria, at 
the head of which stands the Moravian city of 
100 




(3HUH6n. 




r f _^B_ £ 



f)ETKl.EHEV1.PA 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 

Fulnek, this man whose soul had received the bap- 
tism of fire, opened his house for meetings of gos- 
pel fellowship. For this he was sent to jail re- 
peatedly, condemned as an arch heretic. 

In 1723, he, a husband and father, found himself 
in prison with his neighbor, David Schneider. The 
story of their escape is as marvelous as that of 
Peter from the gaol in Jerusalem. Nitschmann 
crossed the mountain border to be joined later 
by his wife and children. The reunited household 
met with a warm welcome in the new Moravian 
colony at Herrnhut. Persecution had only kindled 
the old-time faith and daring. By direction of th(* 
Herrnhut colony, Nitschmann accepted a call to 
take part in the founding of a missionary settle- 
ment in the Danish West Indies. This was in 
173 1. The island of St. Croix was selected. The 
attempt failed. The heroic wife died by her hus- 
band's side and was buried in a tropical grove, but 
Nitschmann did not cease his labors. He returned 
to Europe and tried unsuccessfully to found a Mo- 
ravian colony in Holstein. In 1741 he crossed the 
Atlantic a second time. It was a cold, wintry day, 
but the dauntless Moravian, sixty-four years old, 
standing up to his knees in the snow, felled the first 
tree for the building of Bethlehem. Sixteen years 
lOI 



GNADENSEE 

of quenchless zeal and undaunted toil followed un- 
til by 1758, the year of his death, the settlement had 
become the center of missionary operations, not 
only for the thirteen original colonies, but the 
West Indies and Surinam in South America. The 
grand old man had succeeded at last. Ere he died 
the influence of his life, in ever-widening circles, 
had touched the little Indian village of Wequad- 
nach. 

The colonists of Bethlehem are as interesting as 
its founder. In June, 1742, there reached the south 
bank of the Lehigh a ship's company of fifty-six 
members. They were English and German colo- 
nists, constituting what is known in Moravian an- 
nals as "The First Sea Congregation." On land- 
ing (they had sailed in "The Catharine," from 
Gravesend, England), they divided themselves into 
two parts, known as the "Home Church" and the 
"Pilgrims' Church." Upon the former was laid the 
work of house-building and social economy, on the 
latter the work of gospel evangelization. The ros- 
ter of "The First Sea Congregation" has names 
of great interest. 

Among the twenty-one who were ordained to be 
ministers of the Gospel were Joseph Powell, Jo- 
achim Senseman, C. Frederick Post and Nathan- 
102 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 

iel Seidel, all of whom came to Wequadnach. "The 
Second Sea Congregation" came over in "The Lit- 
tle Strength," which sailed from Cowes and 
dropped anchor off Staten Island, in the latter part 
of November, 1743. This was of more varied na- 
tionality. Over one hundred church members were 
in this ship's company. Church ships brought 
fully six hundred Moravian colonists in the first 
twenty years after the founding of Bethlehem. 

The missionary activity of the Bethlehem econ- 
omy has been pointed out, but there is a practical 
side which must not be overlooked. The care and 
conduct of this Bethlehem settlement is a beautiful 
example of the possibilities of Christian love and 
an interesting study in social economics. There 
were no millionaires and no paupers. All toiled 
and labored, their motto this: "In commune ora- 
mus. In commune laboramus, In commune pati- 
mur. In commune gaudemus." ' 

The Brethren had grist-mills, sawmills and tan- 
neries ; they engaged in joinery, glaziery, linen 
weaving, stocking weaving, rope-making, tailoring, 
brickmaking, mason and carpenter work. Thus 
we see how David Bruce was equally at home 
teaching his Indian converts or toiling with his 

* Together do we pray, labor, suffer, rejoice. 
103 



GNADENSEE 

hands as a carpenter. There were no idle spirits. 
If Bethlehem was the "school of the prophets", its 
practical farmers were sent to Nazareth, a village 
near by. The Brethren called the latter colony 
the "Patriarchen Plan." It is very interesting in 
these days when the world of labor is rent with agi- 
tation and strikes, when the servant-girl question 
is trying the patience of every housekeeper, to read 
of one human hive where all were contented, where 
there were love feasts for the milkers, washers and 
threshers. Spangenberg composed a hymn which 
was sung by the spinning sisters. 

Work now has largely lost its joy and song. 
May it not be because the end is selfish? The ob- 
ject of this work in the Bethlehem economy was 
something other than self-support or mere eco- 
nomic thrift. Increase was used, not hoarded ; the 
profits of industry were employed to send light and 
truth into all the earth. The age of trusts was not 
yet, but the gospel was a trust divinely sent. So- 
cially, the single brethren and sisters had their own 
quarters, but these were not the rigid establish- 
ments of monks and nuns. Marriage was free to 
all who chose it. Such was Bethlehem in its spirit 
and beginnings. 

It was in the latter part of December, 1901, that 
104 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 

a tourist from the Lake of Grace found himself for 
the first time in Bethlehem. He had come to spy 
out the land, impelled by the attraction of a watch- 
night service with trombone accompaniment, in the 
old Moravian church, and a desire to see the place 
whose missionaries had given a tender and unique 
name to a little lake at the foot of Indian Moun- 
tain. Crossing the flooded Lehigh on a swaying 
wooden bridge, he saw on a hill above the dome of 
the old church. That hill is one of the high places 
of the land where veneration is not idolatry. 
There is no more impressive spot in America, un- 
less it be Burial Hill at Plymouth. 

The square, severely plain church, with gray walls 
and blue don^e bespoke a German old world line- 
age — an impression confirmed by the peaked roof, 
dormer windows, bell tower, stone fa9ades and 
quaint courts of the adjoining establishments. The 
first thing to do was to find lodgings. To one in 
search of the historico-picturesque, the Sun Inn was 
the place exactly. It was the first house of enter- 
tainment built by the Moravians. Later it received 
a license from George III. The office, which is the 
oldest part of the building, is hung round with pic- 
tures of early Bethlehem. There is a room where 
Washington slept, the raths-kellar and an adjoining 
105 



GNADENSEE 

cave. Lafayette and Count Pulaski have both 
been honored guests at the Inn. There was just 
time before tea for a stroll through the cemetery. 
The stones lay in rows and were fiat like the Jew- 
ish graves in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Every- 
thing was tenderly sacred. In the northwest or 
abbey corner rest the leaders and founders of the 
church, buried among their Indian converts. It 
must be holy to linger here in the summer even- 
ings. 

"The long grass rising round the graves 
Not even its tiny stalklet waves; 
Nor is a footstep heard : no sound 
Invades this quiet burial-ground." 

It is the custom in Moravian villages for a pro- 
cession with trombones to awaken the inhabitants 
before daybreak on Easter morning. An early ma- 
tin service is held in the church, after which they 
go to the cemetery in season to meet the rising 
sun. The beautiful Easter Morning Litany is used. 
The Service closes with the ascription: 

"Glory be to Him who is the Resurrection and the Life; 
He was dead and behold He is alive forevermore. And 
he that believeth in Him, though he were dead, yet shall 
he live. 

"Glory be to Him in the church which waiteth for Him, 
and in that which is around Him; for ever and ever. 
Amen." 

1 06 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 

The deep blasts of the trombones lend grandeur 
to the service and seem to anticipate the voice of 
the archangel and the trump of God. Here where 
so many of the dead are resting this service has 
been repeated on each successive Easter morning 
for one hundred and sixty years. It annually draws 
great numbers of people from the neighboring vil- 
lages and cities. 

After a good night's rest in the Sun Inn the his- 
toric town claimed attention. A low window in a 
high peaked building behind the church displayed 
this sign, "Moravian Peppermints and Souvenirs." 

That window, like the famous one in Thrums, 
gave a chapter to a book. In a quaint room with- 
in, half kitchen and half store, equally fragrant with 
peppermints and holiness, a Moravian sister pre- 
sided over her household treasures and those tra- 
ditions of which her personality was the embodi- 
ment. The corner-stone of this house (the most 
interesting structure in Bethlehem) was laid Sep- 
tember 28, 1741. Its "Der Saal" was consecrated 
by Count Zinzendorf, and used as a chapel. For 
ten years this building was the only place of wor- 
ship. Ninety-three Indians were baptized within 
its walls, some of whom had come from the region 
around the Lake of Grace. 
107 



GNADENSEE 

The old "Bell Haus," originally a seminary for 
girls, is one of the most picturesque buildings in 
America. With a chapel and the Sisters' House 
it forms an enclosure on three sides, so utterly for- 
eign that one would think himself in Saxony and 
the eighteenth century. 

"Colonial Hall," used now as the Seminary, was 
converted into a military hospital in the Revolu- 
tion. More than five hundred Revolutionary sol- 
diers died within its walls. Washington, Gates, 
Sullivan, Schuyler, Richard Henry Lee, Baron Steu- 
ben, DeKalb, the brave Count Pulaski and Lafay- 
ette all came here to visit sick and dying comrades. 
Back of Colonial Hall was the site of the Indian 
village known as Fried enshiitt en or Tents of Peace, 
an asylum for the Sharon Indians. 

The watch-night service on New Year's Eve was 
attended in the old church by fifteen hundred 
people. First came the Memorabilia, which were 
an outline by the Moravian pastor of the year's 
history, touching on matters pertaining to the 
church, the nation and the world — a tender 
resume. At the stroke of twelve the vast congre- 
gation rose and with the choir burst into song*. 
Loud, long and deep was the trombone accompani- 
ment. It is difficult to tell which is the pleasanter 
io8 



A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM 

memory, this grand thrilling service at midnight 
or a Httle anticipatory meeting with Sister Shultz 
and her Moravian friends, where the tourist en- 
joyed her buns and coffee, and Gemuthlichkeii 
reigned supreme 



109 



THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM 



"They inhabit their own country, but as strangers; they 
bear their part in all things as citizens, and endure all 
things as aliens. Every foreign country is a fatherland to 
them, and every fatherland a foreign country. . , . They 
live in the flesh, but walk not after the flesh. . . . They 
dwell on earth, but are citizens of heaven. They are poor, 
and make many rich; they are in want of all things, and 
they have all things in abundance; they are dishonored, 
and in dishonor glorified." — Epistle to Diognetus, V. 



THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM 



The Moravian has been accused of a want of 
patriotism, but he began his labors in North Amer- 
ica in a time of great difificulty and was entirely 
misunderstood. Most men, being fighting animals, 
cannot understand one who will not fight. The 
Moravian did not come here to fight or build up a 
nation, but to preach a gospel of peace to a savage 
race from whom the aggressive Anglo-Saxon was 
striving to wrest the sovereignty of the soil. He 
stood between the white man and the Indian, an 
object of twofold suspicion, yet the friend of both. 
Carried away by their love of freedom, dazzled by 
their successes and the great hope of acquiring in- 
dependence, the colonials forgot the claims of the 
missionary while they magnified those of the pa- 
triot. The men who fought with the king's sol- 
diers against the French and Indians, and later 
with Washington and Lafayette against the king, 
113 



GNADENSEE 

could not understand a man who had conscientious 
scruples against all fighting. 

There are three types of patriotism which must 
be kept distinct and never depreciated or con- 
founded. There is first an intense but non-right- 
eous type; we hate to call it wicked, although it is 
unethical. This type indulges in oaths during the 
excitement of battle. It demands surrender, as 
Ethan Allen did at Ticonderoga, "in the name of 
the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." 
Somehow, it always makes the "Continental Con- 
gress" more important than the "Great Jehovah ;" 
yet we need this type. 

The second type is purer and higher, is both a 
patriotism and a religion, evfcikes feelings which go 
surging through our nature and keep the world 
heroic. This type is represented by Nathan Hale, 
who, condemned to death as a spy, mounted the 
scaffold, saying, "I regret only that I have but one 
life to lose for my country." We shall never cease 
to feel the rapture of that young, heroic soul. 

There is a third and still higher type represented 
by these men who came to the Lake of Grace. 
They could not endure the thought of blood and 
carnage. Their favorite classic was not Plato's 
Republic or More's Utopia, but the Sermon on 
114 



THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM 

the Mount. They longed for a time to come 
when the war-drum should throb no longer, when 
the meek and not the strong should inherit the 
earth ; yet they were soldiers, too. The Moravian 
was the minuteman of the Lord's army. The call 
might come to go to the frozen shores of Green- 
land, the Ethiopians under the equator, the poor 
slaves of the West Indies, the leper settlements of 
South Africa and Jerusalem or the saVage Indians 
of North America ; it made no difference ; he was 
ready to go anywhere at a moment's notice. It is 
related in Bishop Spangenberg's work on Moravian 
Missions that "Having once made known on a 
prayer day, at Bethlehem, that five missionaries 
had died in a very short time in the island of St. 
Thomas, where the difficulties of our brethren were 
then very great, no less than eight persons volun- 
tarily offered, on that very day, to go thither to re- 
place those who had fallen." When Zinzendorf 
was at Marienborn, a former Moravian settlement 
in Germany, he said one day to a certain brother, 
"Will you go to Greenland to-morrow, as a mis- 
sionary?" It was the first intimation the man had 
had of such a thing, but he replied with scarcely 
a moment's hesitation, "If the shoemaker can finish 
the boots which I have ordered of him by to-mor- 
row, I will go." 



GNADENSEE 

The Moravian was "The Man Without a Coun- 
try." He was a cosmopolitan striving to bring in 
a universal peace on earth. His soul had been 
fired by those visions which cheered the prophets 
and dreamers of Israel. He looked for a Sabbafis- 
mos on earth, when the black-shotted guns should 
moulder on the parapet, these mov'ing volcanoes 
of the ocean sink out of sight, when the plowman 
should till the glebe and the shepherd fold his 
flock securely. Then should Mars' bloody reign 
be over; then should 

"All men's good 
Be each man's rule, and universal Peace 
Lie like a shaft of light across the land, 
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea 
Thro' all the circle of the golden year." 

The Indian mission at Gnadensee was abandoned 
in 1753, a step rendered inevitable by the sale of 
the Indian lands and the consequent dispersion of 
the tribe. The mission had three distinct periods, 
of four years each. Work began in 1741 and ex- 
tended to 1745. This was for entrance and estab- 
lishment, to be interrupted and broken up by per- 
secution and the arm of the civil government. The 
second period was from 1745 to 1749, a time of lan- 
guishing and decline, to be crowned, however, by 
a renewal at its close. The last period was from 
116 



THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM 

1749 to 1753, a period of fruitage and blessing, but 
also disruption and abandonment — abandonment, 
and therefore loss, the commercial instinct will say. 
An age which measures everything by the standard 
of success can see no value in abandoned missions 
and has scant praise for missionsl of any kind. It 
worships supremacy of intellect rather than great- 
ness of heart, constructs out of life's action and 
achievement an arch of triumph for the conqueror, 
but has no praise for the "silent thunder of fidelity." 
There needs to be a recasting of estimates and 
values. When a nation's honor must be defended 
we do not talk of loss, though the prosperity of a 
generation is mortgaged and the surging human 
wave leaves behind its bloody wreckage. If the 
tears and sacrifice of an abandoned mission are 
only waste, then the story of the broken alabaster 
box has no meaning. Machinery abandoned to 
rust and disuse is loss of capital, but the heroism 
of personality is an unspent force, which always 
registers gain somewhere. 



117 



ALONG THE SHARON SHORE 



"Sharon is a pretty New England village with white 
frame houses set back from the wide grass-grown streets, 
almost buried in maples and elms, the favorite shade trees 
of this country. On making a turn in the road we saw it 
high above us on a hill-top, the rays of the declining sun 
lighting up spire and churchyard, the marble tombstones 
glittering like mounds of driven snow." — Moravians in New 
York and Connecticut. 



ALONG THE SHARON SHORE 



The bass and pickerel will not bite to-day; the 
boat drifts idly along the Sharon shore. The di- 
visional between New York and Connecticut runs 
through the center of the lake, a great convenience 
to fishermen, who, when threatened for violating 
the law in one state, always swear they were in 
the other. 

Fishermen have low ethics and ideals. Their 
bump of truthfulness has the defect of Ananias. 
But we must not be too severe. Christ chose his 
apostles from among fishermen, one of whom was 
the founder and organizer of his Church. That 
fisher's coat which Peter girt about him when he 
cast himself into the sea, would be a more valuable 
find than the toga of Marcus Aurelius. The pic- 
ture of a fish is often found on the rings, gems and 
utensils of the early Christians ; is the favorite mon- 
ogram on the tombs in the Catacombs. The Greek 

121 



GNADENSEE 

word ichthus is an acrostic for Jesus Christ, Son of 
God, our Saviour. Christ is called the carpenter's 
son in the Gospels, but there is an early hymn of 
the Church, by Clement of Alexandria, addressed to 
Him as the fisherman : 

"Fisher of men, the Blest, 
Out of the world's unrest, 
Out of sin's troubled sea. 
Taking us. Lord, to Thee." 

What were these missionaries at Gnadensee but 
fishermen? That is all, but that is enough. For 
some reason the Brethren were very fond of Sharon 
as a name. One of their missions in Barbadoes 
was called Sharon and another on the Saramacca 
in Guiana. 

Drifting along the Sharon shore! The Sharon of 
Scripture was the great maritime plain south of 
Carmel and Esdraelon. It was the highway of the 
nations. Over it swept the armies of Rameses, 
Sennacherib, Cambyses, Alexander, Vespasian and 
Napoleon. Peter dwelt awhile at Sharon, with one 
Simon, a tanner, whose house was by the seaside. 
The old road still runs from Jafifa to Jerusalem 
through groves of pomegranates and oranges. 
Scarlet tulips and poppies are in the fields. The 
white narcissus, the rose of Sharon, blooms 

122 



ALONG THE SHARON SHORE 

everywhere. Nightingales fill the air with song. 
The landscape is wrapped in a warm south haze, 
above which wave those "silent groves of palm" — 
on the east the blue of the far-ofif hills, on the west 
the blue of the sea, with its line of yellow sand and 
broken foam. 

The boat is opposite the monument now — the 
mountain and the monument are mirrored in the 
perfect water. The Lake of Grace is a sea of glass 
mingled with fire like that which John saw in Pat- 
mos, a sea where time's surges beat no more, where 
sorrow's billows never come, but where bright 
wavelets crest themself on shining sands and rip- 
ple in the music of their joy forever. 

The stars will come out to-night, the same which 
Abraham saw in his wanderings, which attracted 
the gaze of Chaldean astronomers, which shone 
when the pyramids were young and which shine 
on and on, while the generations of men live out 
their little lives and pass to the dark halls of death. 

Yes, we grow old in silent years and the grim 
ferryman, stoled in black, at last rows us over the 
lake to the burial-ground upon its shore; but an 
old book says, "they that turn many to righteous- 
ness shall shine as tlie stars for ever and ever," and 
the prophet was thinking of David Bruce and Jo- 
seph Powell. 



PART II 



THE FRAME 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 



"If one has not leisure for detailed explorations, and 
can spend but a week, let him begin, say at Sharon or Salis- 
bury, both in Connecticut, and both accessible from the 
Harlem railroad. On either side, to the east and to the 
west, ever-varying mountain-forms frame the horizon. 
There is a constant succession of hills swelling into moun- 
tains, and of mountains flowing down into hills. . . . On 
the west of Salisbury you ascend Mount Riga to Bald 
Peak, thence to Brace Mountain, thence to the Dome, 
thence to that grand ravine and its wild water, Bash-Bish — 
a ride in all of about eighteen miles, and wholly along the 
mountain-bowl. On the eastern side of this range is 
Sage's Ravine, which is the antithesis of Bash-Bish. Sage's 
Ravine, not without grandeur, has its principal attractions 
in its beauty; Bash-Bish, far from destitute of beauty, is 
yet most remarkable for grandeur. Both are solitary, 
rugged, full of rocks, cascades, grand waterfalls, and a 
savage rudeness tempered to beauty and softness by va- 
rious and abundant mosses, lichens, flowers and vines. I 
would willingly make the journey once a month from New 
York to see either of them." — "Star Papers," Henry Ward 
Beecher. 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 



There are some people whose brains are lined 
with black. You would think to talk with them 
that old Burton had them in mind when he wrote 
his "Anatomy of Melancholy." Instead of hearing 
the robins sing and seeing Aurora walk the lake 
with golden sandals, they rise, as Cowper did, "like 
an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the 
ooze and mud of melancholy." Such persons 
should break up this habit of mental vivisection. 
Burton cured his melancholy by going to the 
bridge foot and hearing the bargemen swear, which 
invariably threw him into a fit of laughter. Cow- 
per wrote "John Gilpin." Johnson, spleeny old 
hypochondriac, was a London vagrant, haunting 
publishers with his unbought manuscript, glad to 
dine on suspicious tripe at a cookshop, under- 
ground, wiping his hands, after the greasy meal, 
on the back of a Newfoundland dog, until at last 
129 



GNADENSEE 

he found and made love to a widow, who had chil- 
dren as old as himself. But there is a better way 
to cure melancholy for those not afflicted with this 
disease of genius, and that is to climb every hill 
and mountain in sight. This assumes that you are 
a disciple of Roosevelt, love "the strenuous life," 
that your heart action is sound and that you have 
the stride of a golfer. 

It is quite certain now that the ladder of Jacob's 
dream, whose top reached to heaven, was con- 
structed out of those mountain ranges which he 
saw at sunset as he lay there out under the Syrian 
sky. Rising from the waters of Gnadensee there is 
a stairway to dream about and over which the an- 
gels might pass continually. It was the dominat- 
ing feature in a landscape dear to Moravian eyes, 
the "Delectable Mountains" rising from his mission 
by the Lake of Grace. 

The first stair is Indian Mountain or Poconnuck. 
So steep is the wall on the western side that it al- 
most descends into the lake, reminding one of that 
"prisoners' safe stairway" in the castle of Chillon, 
where the poor victims walked trustingly ofi the 
dark steps to fall into the deep water below. From 
the summit numerous lakes can be seen. This is 
the Lake Country of Connecticut and can be com- 
130 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

pared with the scenery around Grasmere and Der- 
wentwater. If one has time, the best way is to walk 
the entire length of the mountain. Passing from 
side to side and coming out on the ledges there are 
beautiful views of Webotuck and Gnadensee. Gna- 
densee is more in sight. Its waters gleam continu- 
ally through the trees. Like a smiling face they 
are ever saying, "Behold me!" Yet it is no self- 
conscious summons, but rather the attraction of an 
irresistible charm. It must be confessed, however, 
that the thick woods, which make the sides of Po- 
connuck so attractive to the eye, interfere some- 
what with the view. The ideal mountain for a view 
is one which has its crown shaven like a monk's, 

Poconnuck and ptarmigan! The woods on the 
mountain are full of grouse, or would be if the hunt- 
ers would leave them alone. There is a frequent 
whir of wings and one is touched by the boldness 
and wiles of the mother bird to protect her covey. 
The grouse on Poconnuck and the ptarmigan of 
the Arctic lands are the same family, only the lat- 
ter change their color from the mossy hue of the 
tundra to the whiteness of the frozen plains. An 
Alaskan gold hunter wrote a poem on a wounded 
ptarmigan. What is poetry, after all, but the voice 
of some experience which will not be mute, a ran- 
131 



GNADENSEE 

dom bird song? It was Vogelweid, the minne- 
singer, who said he learned the art of song from 
the minstrels of the air, and left the monks his 
treasures with the request that they should daily 
feed the birds as they gathered on his tomb. 

The second stair is Mount Riga, which is reached 
by taking the road from Ore Hill. Strung along, a 
few farms have vainly tried to reclaim the moun- 
tain. Hawks and crows, wheeling overhead, and 
saucy jays, exult and mock at man' failure. When 
farmers up here are asked how large the farm is, 
they say, "Half an acre is land, the rest is creation." 
There is a little settlement with a schoolhouse, and 
near the dam, at the outlet of some ponds, are the 
ruins of an old iron furnace. Mount Riga has had 
an industrial history. Here was forged a chain, in 
the war of the Revolution, which the Continentals 
stretched across the Hudson, in order to impede 
the British ships. Among the Obstruction Relics 
preserved at "The Hasbrouck House," Newburgh, 
N. Y., which was Washington's headquarters dur- 
ing the latter part of the war, is the link of an old 
chain taken from the bottom of the Hudson oppo- 
site Fort Montgomery; also a portion of the boom, 
obstructing the river at West Point. The iron 
work was done at Mount Riga. While George the 
132 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

Third and his Tory cabinet were forging the chains 
of colonial oppression, the furnace men on Mount 
Riga were forging chains to stop his majesty's 
ships and terribly humble his pride. The patriot 
army guarded the passes of the Highlands. Once 
Sir Henry Clinton's banners waved in victory from 
the lower forts, but it was only a momentary tri- 
umph. Burgoyne's surrender compelled his re- 
treat. From the beginning to the end of the war, 
the Hudson was a chained river. 

When the Greeks freed themselves from the Turk- 
ish yoke, two anchors were cast on Mount Riga 
for frigates of the Greek government. Musket iron 
was also made for the United States armories at 
Harper's Ferry and Springfield. The story of free- 
dom would not be complete without a Mount Riga 
chapter. 

One and a half miles westward is ''Lotus Lodge" 
or Warner's Camp, romantically situated on North 
or Riga Lake. Three mountains rise up, one in 
in New York, one in Connecticut, and one in Mas- 
sachusetts. It is the Lake of the Three States. 
The water is so pure and cold that the pickerel, 
when caught, are transparent. This lake on the 
top of a mountain is a lens or mirror of prehis- 
toric time. Its wild beauty abides 
133 



GNADENSEE 

"IcTi sah Dich einmal 
Und ich sehe Dich immer." 

Below the Mount Riga dam the stream rushes 
madly down to Salisbury, four miles below. 

The Indians called the Riga stream WacJiocas- 
tinook, "falling water." In these woods you can- 
not get away from the roar of waterfalls. You are 
listening to the oldest music in the world. 

"The sound of streams that swift or slow 
Draw down eonian hills and sow 
The dust of continents to be." 

It would seem fitting that such a region should 
have some thrilling story or legend. One of the 
oldest inhabitants says a mulatto slave who es- 
caped by the "Undergroimd Railroad" and came 
here, fell in love with a beautiful Indian girl, whom 
he married. One day a traveler came along and 
with reckless rudeness insulted the young wife. He 
had focused a burning lens on her bare bosom. 
Indian nature never forgets or forgives an injury, 
and soon after the traveler was found by the road- 
side, stabbed to death. The bride and wife had 
done it, but her lover was so true and devoted, that 
to save her he confessed to the crime and died in 
her stead. It is a thrilling, ghastly story of human 
passion, a tale of expiation, mingled with weird 
touches of second sight and spirit phenomena. 
134 




(4 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

It is hard, sometimes, to tell where history ends 
and legend begins. Every legend, like a comet, 
has a nucleus of reality with a tail of imagination. 
The legend makers dream and invent ; the critics 
pursue them to the cities of refuge. 

Hidden in the woods of Mount Riga is a little 
pond. Dark spruces grow around it and in a quak- 
ing bog the sullen waters frown. It is the pool of 
the murdered traveler; the dark spruces are his 
glossy hair and the water-soaked bog his bloody 
garments. Hardly a person comes here in the live- 
long year. Man and animals shun the place, but 
sometimes there is a person who wants to test his 
nerves. Let him visit the sullen pond at the dead 
of night. Let him prepare for it by reading The 
Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, and 
The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Let him come 
when the forest is bare and brown, when the wind 
shrieks and moans through the trees, when it dies 
away in a gasp and sigh and in that cold stillness 
between the midnight and the dawn, the mist arises 
and the ghost of the dead man moves about. Do n't 
flinch or be speechless now. You wanted to test 
your nerves. Stand on the quaking bog by the 
sullen pool and — recite Poe. 

135 



GNADENSEE 

"The skies they were ashen and sober 

The leaves they were withering and sere; 

It was night in the lonesome October 
Of my most immemorial year; 

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 

'T is a pity if a man can't see a ghost in the mist, 
when the inhabitants of Mount! Riga see portents 
in the sky and the judgments of the day of doom 
before they arrive. 

There are blood-curdhng screams around the 
haunted pool. They sound hke the cries of one in 
pain, whose Hmbs the fiends are rending or whom 
some one is stabbing to death. Whoever has heard 
those screams will not go to the haunted pool at 
midnight and recite Poe, but stay at home and eat 
celery. The screams might be those of a murdered 
traveler, but there are wildcats on the mountain. 

The road from Mount Riga leads to a sign where 
a walk of a few minutes brings the tourist out on 
Bald Peak. Instantly, there is an unveiling, for 
which you were not prepared. You are in a world 
older than the Alps. The loneliness appals. Here 
Shelley might have written "The Spirit of Soli- 
tude." The view is archaic, but superb. Moun- 
tains to right of you, mountains to left of you, 
mountains in front and behind you — the Dome 
136 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

and Greylock to the north, Canaan Mountain and 
the Litchfield Hills to the east, Poconnuck and the 
Highlands of the Hudson to the south, with the 
faint line of the Shawangunks and there, grandest 
of all, looming against the west, the Catskills, with 
their bastions and peaks. Lakes flash and gleam; 
the eagle's scream blends with the gale. Up here, 
soon after the snow leaves the valleys, arbutus per- 
fumes the air; in early summer the mountain sides 
are pink with laurel. 

No one has ever understood Wordsworth, who 
has not stood by some lonely lake like these on 
Mount Riga, or better still, rowed out on them. 

"There sometimes doth a leaping fish 
Send throLigli the tarn a lonely cheer; 

The crags repeat the raven's croak 
In symphony austere." 

By taking an old wood road, one can pass through 
the northwest corner of the state. 'Tis a pleasure 
to find the spot, sit over it and dangle your legs in 
New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. If you 
are not a bachelor you will be in four states at 
once. How the Prayer Book loves that holy es- 
tate of matrimony! The corner of Connecticut 
was not always easy to find. The Charter of 
Charles II, under whose generous and humane pro- 
137 



GNADENSEE 

visions the people lived till 1818, granted all the 
land from "Narragansett Bay on the east to the 
South Sea on the west, with the islands thereunto 
adjoining," This located the northwest corner 
somewhere in the Western Reserve of Ohio, which 
was claimed for a long time as the foundation of a 
school fund ; according to others the corner was in 
the Aleutian Islands. Charles, though a mean 
king, was not mean with his Charter, since it gave 
Connecticut a strip of land seventy miles wide and 
extending one-eighth of the distance round the 
globe. 

The next stair is Bear Mountain, twenty-three 
hundred and fifty-five feet in height and crowned 
with a tower. This pyramid of stones, for such it 
is, was erected by Robbins Battell of Norfolk to 
mark the highest altitude in the state and is known 
as the Battell Tower. To reach it from Bald Peak 
one must keep the road to the north, then turn to 
the east, at a sign, and eventually leaving every- 
thing behind and below, clamber up with an occa- 
sional header into the bushes. It is a good stifif 
climb, but not impossible for young ladies. There 
is an essential satisfaction about a moderate ele- 
vation like Bear Mountain. It resembles the fam- 
ily coat of arms. 

138 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

"Nolo terrare 
Nescio timere." 

"I am unwilling to terrify and I know not how to 
be afraid." Great mountains, the Chimborazos 
and Popocatapetls, terrify. It is uncertain whether 
the man who has climbed them is a wise man or a 
fool. The rarefied air may bring on a hemorrhage. 
Men pay dearly for their boldness in attempting 
the highest peaks. Since the Matterhorn was first 
scaled in 1865, thirty lives have been sacrificed 
upon this "Fiend of the Alps," but the worst thing 
that can happen to you on Bear Mountain is to 
find that, when ravenously hungry, you forgot to 
take the key to the sardine box and that there is 
not a nail or spike on the mountain. 

There is a tale of pathos in this wild country 
around Bear Mountain. On the morning of Me- 
morial Day, 1889, a little boy, three years old, 
wandered into the woods and was lost. His pa- 
rents were respectable people, Bonhotel by name, 
who had emigrated from the Channel Islands. 
Their occupation was burning charcoal. The boy 
when last seen on that eventful day was playing 
near the barn. His brothers were away from the 
house in one direction and his parents in another, 
making charcoal, each supposing the boy to be with 
139 



GNADENSEE 

the other party; but when they came together at 
night he was not to be found. The entire family 
spent the night hunting with lanterns, but all to 
no avail — the boy was lost. Early the next day 
the village of Salisbury was aroused and fifty men 
entered upon the search. The news flew quickly 
and widely. By the third day two hundred men 
had enlisted. They came from all the surrounding 
country. Long lines of men, ten feet apart, ex- 
plored the mountain tract for miles. There was 
reason for alarm. A chilling rain had fallen from 
the first and the little fellow only had on a single 
garment. The rain chilled the searching parties 
to the marrow. Men got lost in the darkness, 
climbed trees and shouted to get out. They stum- 
bled and floundered about, nerved with despair and 
hope, a hope to find the boy's body, for the behef 
had now become general that he was dead. 

The morning of the fourth day dawned with no 
trace of the lost boy. By this time the news had 
traveled over the country. It was no longer a lo- 
cal matter. One thing was in favor of the search- 
ing parties — the sun came out at last. It was on 
the fourth day that two men, who had organized 
an independent search and spent all the forenoon 
exploring the forest around Bear Mountain, saw 
140 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

something moving in the bushes. One of them 
approached it, trembHng with excitement. It was 
not a fox but the lost boy. The man wrapped 
the boy in his own warm shirt, placed him in 
an old charcoal basket and then drove at full 
speed to the Bonhotel cabin. The boy was in a 
pitiable condition. His blouse was torn and be- 
draggled, his legs scratched by the bushes and his 
poor little fingers sucked to a point, but he was 
alive. As the two men flew on a mighty shout 
went up, "The boy is found ! the boy is found !" 
Men passed the news along the lines ; rose up out 
of the woods from everywhere. "Benledis' living 
side" never saw such a spectacle. The mountain 
road was alive with men and teams, all converg- 
ing on the Bonhotel cabin. Strong arms handed 
the boy to his mother. 'T is said she folded him 
to her heart, kissed him passionately, prayed over 
him, and then, when she reahzed that her lost Emil 
was safe, a light came into her face, such as the old 
masters put into the faces of their Madonnas. 

How did the boy live and what were his expe- 
riences during those days and nights in the woods? 
We do not know and we never shall. The heart- 
ache of the parents we can understand, but who can 
fathom the heart of a child? The mother said she 
141 



GNADENSEE 

found traces of bark in his mouth and the boy told 
the doctor by signs that he ate leaves. Some have 
thought that the little fellow was mentally afifected 
by his terrible experiences. 'T is said that after- 
wards he seemed like an elf child. However that 
may be, for years in Salisbury, where the Bonhotels 
came later to reside, Emil was known as "The Lost 
Boy." 

In the "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life"' 
there is the story of a babe that was carried ofif by 
an eagle. The mother had laid her sleeping child 
on the ground, when an eagle swooped down and 
bore it aloft to his eyrie. The mother's agony and 
the grief of all the people in the glen are depicted, 
and then, as by a miracle, a man, who had climbed 
to the rocky height, rescued the babe, sleeping 
quietly, and bore it to its mother. The Riga Moun- 
tains have their lights and shadows. One of them 
is this story of "The Lost Boy." 

Over behind Bear Mountain is Sage's Ravine. 

"God plowed one day with an earthquake 
And drove his furrows deep." 

The Ravine descends to the "Under Mountain 
Road," the gate and entrance to Southern Berk- 
shire. There are steep, mossy walls where a slip of 
the foot is fatal ; forest glooms shot through with 
142 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

scanty light and cooled by mists where the rain- 
bows dance. To ascend the Ravine to its head 
waters is like John Ridd's famous climb in Lorna 
Doone. The Ravine is no place to trifle with. Be- 
lated tourists have had to spend the night. It is 
awfully lonely to be up there alone, like that chasm 
Coleridge dreamed he saw in the domain of Kubla 
Khan at Xanadu, 

"A savage place! as holy and enchanted 

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 

By woman wailing for her demon lover!" 

At this exact spot, however, the trout fishing is 
particularly good. Beecher knew the Ravine and 
loved its glooms and waterfalls. The streets of 
Brooklyn had no charm like this. 

There is one more stair to climb. It is over the 
line in Massachusetts and the grandest of them all. 
It dominates Southern Berkshire ; is the second 
highest mountain in Massachusetts, being twenty- 
six hundred and twenty-four feet and exceeded 
only by Greylock. It is rightly called "The Dome 
of the Taconics." It should be climbed just at sun- 
set. Whether seen from Lenox churchyard or ap- 
proached as the last in this Scala Regia, which as- 
cends from Gnadensee, it is majestic and impres- 
sive. Somewhere, in one of his letters, Webster 
143 



GNADENSEE 

writes, "O the sea, the sea and Marshfield!" Many 
a lover of Berkshire scenery, looking across the 
meadows of the Housatonic at Sheffield or floating 
idly over the Twin Lakes in Salisbury, has ex- 
claimed, "The Dome, The Dome and Berkshire!" 

On the Dome of the Taconics one stands under 
a vaster dome. Those stairs mounting up from the 
Lake of Grace are pillars along the aisle of some 
great cathedral. Ruskin says of the mountains, 
"They seem to have been built for the human race, 
as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treas- 
ures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, 
kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in 
pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness 
for the worshiper. And of these great cathedrals 
of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of 
cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow 
and vaults of purple traversed by the continual 

stars" Here the Ruskin meditation was 

broken by the vesper bell which called to worship. 

At the foot of The Dome the arbutus blooms 
abundantly and here at Sky Farm the Goodale sis- 
ters, Dora and Elaine, have sung sweetly about the 
flowers and birds of their beloved Berkshire. The 
fruitage has not equaled the buds of promise, but 
the poems came spontaneously. At the time of our 
144 



THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE 

visit two Carolina or mourning-doves flew out of 
the apple-trees in the orchard. They seemed to 
say, "Since our Berkshire songsters have left their 
mountain nest and flown away, we mourn for them 
in the trees of Sky Farm." It was early spring, cool 
and wet. 

That line in Christabel was true, 

"The spring comes slowly up this way," 

but spring in Berkshire picks, with cold fingers, the 
arbutus blossoms from under the damp April leaves 
and takes that perfume which is the breath of love. 



145 



THE SOUL OF THE PINES 



"A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the 
fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resi- 
nous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple 
wood, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light 
and shade, or the sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden 
times among young mythologies, we should say that pines 
held the imprisoned spirits of naiads and water-nymplis, and 
that their sounds were of the water for whose lucid depth 
they always sighed. At any rate, the first pines must have 
grown on the seashore and learned their first accents from 
the surf and the waves; and all their posterity have in- 
herited the sound, and borne it inland to the mountains." 
— "A Walk Among Trees," — Henry Ward Beecher. 



THE SOUL OF THE PINES 



On the east shore of Gnadensee is a grove of 
pines to which already a reference has been made. 
These groves are a marked feature of the lakes 
and rivers in this region. They slope down to the 
shore of Lake Webotuck ; you find them on Long 
Pond above ; the cottages and tents of campers on 
the Twin Lakes peep out from among them ; on 
the road to Falls Village is an arcade of pines with 
the roaring, foaming Housatonic below, and in 
Cornwall Plains a little south of the village is one 
of the finest groves in the state. 

The Pinus Strobus, White or Weymouth pine, 
is the tallest, the most stately and beautiful of all 
our cone-bearing trees, sometimes reaching a 
height of one hundred and twenty feet. It is an 
ornament on park or lawn, standing often in the 
dooryard as a plumed and uniformed sentinel over 
149 



GNADENSEE 

the Lares and Penates of the home. The tree is 
most valuable economically and the uses to which 
it can be put are legion. Its name strobus was the 
designation of a Persian tree now unknown. 
Weymouth Pine is the name given to it in Eng- 
land ever since it was cultivated by Lord Wey- 
mouth. White Pine is the name by which it is 
commonly known and distinguished from six other 
species in the New England and Middle Atlantic 
states. The tree ranges from Newfoundland to 
Manitoba, is found in the southern Appalachians, 
grows at an altitude of four thousand three hundred 
feet in North Carolina and two thousand three hun- 
dred feet in the Adirondacks. It flourishes on sandy 
soil, especially that formed by the disintegration 
of granite rocks ; is a rapid grower, sending out its 
branches so thickly as to form a dense roof above 
and arranges its slender green needles in dehcate 
whorls of five. 

This grove at Gnadensee is a place where the 
carriage drives slowly and where if you are wise 
you will stop to catch the soul of the pines. The 
trunks tower above you like Corinthian columns, 
there is a soft brown carpet beneath your feet, a 
subdued light around, a stillness which is the hush 
of reverence and awe broken only by that con- 
150 




The Pines of Gnadensee 



THE SOUL OF THE PINES 

tinual murmur in the tree-tops and the ripple of 
the waves on the stony beach. 

The soul of the pines is the infinite sadness of 
the world. This world is out of harmony with it- 
self. Things do not move in accordance with the 
aim and end of creation. Sin has disarranged the 
cosmos. There is friction, suffering, misery un- 
speakable. Man and nature war against each other 
and struggle with themselves. Goethe somewhere 
says that nature is like an imprisoned spirit longing 
and striving to be free. There is a great world sor- 
row, a bondage of corruption. This bondage was not 
inherent and original, but came with sin. It has 
pleased God to so link creation with man's destiny 
that it shares in his present degradation and is 
emancipated only at his future glorification. We 
do not relieve this sadness by saying that the sur- 
vival of the fittest is the law of nature or even 
God's law. The survival of the fittest is not al- 
ways the survival of the best. The soul of the 
pines is this deep sadness of the world, but a sad- 
ness that feels also the hopeful breath of eternity. 
In the pines you feel that the ocean is near. 
Those low, soft sounds are the susurrus of the soul 
or the murmur of the sea. In the piney woods of 
Cape Cod, before you emerge you can hear the 

T5I 



GNADENSEE 

monotone of the surf, and as you come nearer, the 
long, resounding roar and thunderous pounding of 
the breakers. The pine belt extends all along the 
great Atlantic plain, and one born in it who must 
live far inland is always homesick for the scent of 
the pines. The old Berserker spirit is in his blood. 
Dwellers on the prairie and in the pine woods can 
never understand each other. The New England 
poets have all felt this soul of the pines calling to 
the sea for its deep, sad answers. 

"Its cloudy boughs singing as suiteth the pine, 
To snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine." 

— Lowell. 

The drip of the salt spray and the rage of the 
northeaster is in the pines of Plymouth and 
Marshfield just as when the Pilgrims landed. 

The pine is the tree of the Northland, the ar- 
morial design and fighting plume of the old Norse 
warriors. There have been three zones of con- 
quest and civilization ; they are represented by the 
palm, the olive and the pine. 

The palm land is that of the fierce Arab. Out of 
his desert wastes he has swept on the wings of the 
simoom to force upon the world his science and 
religion. Had it not been for Charles Martel and 
his Franks, the banners of Islam would float to-day 
152 



THE SOUL OF THE PINES 

over the capitals of Europe and the mosques of 
the caUphs would supplant the cathedrals. 

The realm, of the olive is the fair land of south- 
ern Europe. In the' clear Attic air and on those 
islands scattered like gems in the sapphire seas, 
every object stood out distinctly — the temple on 
the height, the long, thin smoke of the volcano, 
the slopes where the bees of Hymettus made their 
honey and the marbles of Pentelicus were quarried. 
The Rulers of the South, as Marion Crawford calls 
them, dwelt here. Beauty was worshiped. Greek 
heroes sculptured on the Parthenon were deified 
on Olympus. 

The land of the pine was different from 
either or both. Gloomy mountains, boulder-strewn 
wastes, heath and moor, endless forests of fir, low- 
ering skies, howling storms, the heaving, moaning 
sea surrounded the Teuton and the Norseman. If 
Greek mythology was a religion of beauty, the 
Norse was a religion of strength. It is to the 
Niebelungen-Lied and old Norse Eddas that we 
must look for the spiritual gianthood of Carlyle 
and Goethe. Emerson says, "Out of unhandseled 
savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berser- 
kers, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare." 

The composers and musicians of the North have 
^53 



GNADENSEE 

all felt the soul of the pines. Handel, Mozart and 
Beethoven have strains too sacred for a dance of 
the nymphs. Ole Bull does not pipe a shepherd's 
ditty to a flock on Sicilian hills, but you hear in 
his violin the sighing of Norwegian' firs, the shriek 
of the wind, the voice of the waterfall, the runes 
of Scald and Viking, catching in the interludes of 
his playing the wild, weird music of the Northern 
Sea. 

The men of the pine lands are the men of 
strength and freedom always. Arminius and his 
Germans broke the power of the legionaries ; Lu- 
ther defied and curbed the Papacy. Gustavus 
Adolphus, Hampden, Cromwell, Washington, Lin- 
coln, all breathed this spirit of the pines. That is 
a grand sentence in King'sley in which he gathers 
up and puts into the death of Hereward, those in- 
fluences which, let loose, have made the British 
and American peoples. It is the soul of the pines. 

"And they talked and sung of Hereward and all his 
doughty deeds, over the hearth in lone farmhouses, or in 
the outlaw's lodge beneath the hollins green; and all the 
burden of their song was, 'Ah, that Hereward were alive 
again !' for they knew not that Hereward was alive for- 
ever more; that only his husk and shell lay mouldering 
there in Crowland choir; that above them, and around 
them, and in them, destined to raise them out of that bitter 
bondage, and mould them into a great nation, and the pa- 



THE SOUL OF THE PINES 

rents of still greater nations in lands as yet unknown, 
brooded the immortal spirit of Hereward, now purged from 
all earthly dross, even the spirit of Freedom, which can 
never die." 

This mighty repubHc, so big with achievement 
and destiny, pulses with this spirit of freedom, law- 
less though it be at times. Too busy in making 
an epic to stop to sing it, when that epic is written 
it will have the soul and spirit of the pines. 

Amiel says, 

"They (the pines) recalled to me the poetry of the North, 
wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland, or 
Sweden, Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and tlie Hebrides. 
All that world of cold and mist, of genius and reverie, 
where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart, 
where man is more noticeable than nature, — that chaste and 
vigorous world, in which will plays a greater part than 
sensation, and thought has more power than instinct, — in 
short, the whole romantic circle of German and Northern 
poetry awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim 
upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality and 
acts upon one like a moral tonic." 

The soul of the pines is health. Therefore in- 
valids and consumptives seek the piney sands of 
Aiken and the forests of Saranac. The pines give 
out oxygen and thus purify the air for respiration. 
Man consumes this oxygen, breathing it back into 
the air in the form, of carbonic acid. The pines 
155 



GNADENSEE 

keep the carbon, and so the process goes on end- 
lessly. There is no waste, no excess. 

The pines of Gnadensee are not confined to the 
grove which has been mentioned. There are many 
noble trees scattered along the western shore. 
Rounding a point of land one day we saw a tent 
of campers among them. It must be romantic to 
sleep out here in the moonlight, aye, to be buried 
in such a spot. One thinks of the old Norse 
lovers, 

"When round the hills the pale moonlight is thrown 
And midnight dews fall on the Bauta-stone 
We'll sit, O Thorsten, in our rounded graves 
And speak together o'er the gentle waves." 

There is a tenderness of the pine which is most 
pathetic. It does not reproduce itself with the 
vigor of other trees. As soon as it is cut down the 
root dies ; there is no power to send up new shoots 
from the stump, as in the maple. The seed is light 
and cannot germinate except under the most favor- 
able conditions. As Darwin says, "the Oaks have 
driven the Pines from the sands." The axe and the 
wooden house sound the knell of the pine groves ; 
the brown needles beneath your feet recall a lost 
and vanished race, a race of noble trees and stately 
men. 

156 



THE SOUL OF THE PINES 

There is no such beautiful tree in all the woods 
as a perfect pine. The individual pine has a beauty 
it can never acquire in the dense grove, for the lower 
branches have a chance to grow. On two occa- 
sions the writer has seen this perfection of the in- 
dividual pine. The first was from a car window in 
southern New Hampshire, at sunset. The tree 
stood alone out in a field. It was the picture of 
the burning bush, burning but unconsumed, every 
bough a shaft of light and all that cloud of needles 
and every faintest tip a mass of scintillant fire. 
The other was on the Italian lakes. Passing down 
Lago Maggiore we landed at Isola Bella, one of 
the Borromean Isles. Here was a nobleman's 
chateau with its fairy grotto. Napoleon's bed, and 
superb vue du lac, the white villas dotting the 
shores, and the snow-covered Alps in the dis- 
tance. It was the home of the mulberry and the 
vine. We were conducted into the jardin. Here 
were shrubs and trees from every clime growing in 
a climate fit for Paradise Regained, — the eucalyp- 
tus, the cypress pyramid, oleanders, strange trees 
from Australia, but there was one tree which stood 
out alone, the most beautiful of all. It was the 
Pinus Strobus or White Pine of North America, 
the same we had seen so often in boyhood ; those 
157 



GNADENSEE 

groves stretching away to the Marshfield Hills of 
old Plymouth County, with the Atlantic out there 
somewhere in the haze, three thousand miles of 
open ocean to the hills of Spain. The beauty of 
the tree may have been enhanced by tender as- 
sociations and a touch of homesickness, but it 
seemed like those which in Jotham's fable had 
a voice. The pines of Gnadensee are just as 
beautiful as this one on Lago Maggiore, but some- 
how we never appreciate the common until it is 
rare. Did these pines grow only on Isola Bella 
people would cross the ocean to see them. As 
one lingers in this grove by the Lake of Grace he 
thinks of that old Accadian Paradise whose "tree 
of life" was "the holy pine" of Eridu, the garden 
and the sacred river being a legend of man's lost 
Eden. 



158 



AN OLD ORE BED 



"Life is not as idle ore, 
But iron dug from central gloom, 

And heated hot with burning fears, 

And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 
And battered with the shocks of doom 

To shape and use." 

— "In Memoriam," Tennyson. 



AN OLD ORE BED 



At the foot of Indian Mountain, lying between 
it and the Lake of Grace, is an old ore bed. It is 
a "dead pit" once used in surface mining but now 
abandoned. Following the road northward around 
the mountain to Ore Hill there is a "live pit" 
where still the brown hematite is dug out and 
carried to the foundry to be cast into car wheels. 
It is claimed that no better ore for this purpose 
exists anywhere. It has a remarkable tensile 
strength and toughness, combined with a harden- 
ing of the surface, that adapts it to the require- 
ments of rolling-stock. Like the shipmasters of 
Cape Cod, the ironmasters of Salisbury have long 
made this region famous, forming an aristocracy 
of wealth and ability. Before the Revolutionary 
War even iron mining was carried on here. The 
Connecticut Geological Report for 1837 says, "The 
best Salisbury iron has obtained a decided prefer- 
161 



GNADENSEE 

ence over all other iron, either foreign or domestic, 
for the construction of musket and rifle barrels." 

Although at the present time the output of Salis- 
bury iron is belittled by the immense productions 
of the South and West, where ores can be mined at 
cheaper rates, and though there is no demand for 
gun metal since the introduction of Bessemer steel, 
still this iron maintains its high standard and its 
manufactured products are sold as fast as made. 

A visit to these mines at Ore Hill reminds one 
of the battle of the angels in Paradise Lost, who 
"pluck'd the seated hills with all their load," "main 
promontories flung," until the air was full of pon- 
derous missiles. 

You seem to be on a battle-field of the Titans. 
The great pits and heaps of earth, verdureless and 
brown, the red silt of the mine flowing over the 
fields, are unnatural to the landscape. But it is as 
one descends into the pit that he finds the weirdest 
fascination. It is a veritable descent into the In- 
ferno, and the inscription that Dante saw over the 
gates of hell might with propriety be written over 
the black hole through which you are lowered, 
three hundred feet, into the bowels of the earth. 

"Through me the way is to the city dolent, 
Through me the way is to eternal dole, 
All hope abandon, ye who enter in !" 
162 



AN OLD ORE BED 

The most productive mine for a long time has 
been the famous "Brook Pit" which shows no sign 
of exhaustion although the tunnels run far out un- 
derground. A force of seventy-five men takes out 
daily as many tons of ore. This ore is screened, 
crushed, washed, loaded on cars and taken to the 
furnace in Lime Rock, where it is made into car 
wheels. The "Brook Pit" is in charge of skilled 
Cornish miners who are very courteous to visitors. 

To descend into the mine one must dress for it 
and wear rubber boots, for when he comes out he 
is sure to have more iron on his clothes than in 
his blood. Lying low in the iron truck, so that the 
head cannot strike the timbers above, you are rap- 
idly lowered down the shaft by a steel cable. 
There are landings at different levels, whence gal- 
leries and tunnels branch off, at the end of which 
one finds the miners at work with pick, shovel, 
powder and dynamite. Every one going down into 
the mine is supplied with candles set into an iron 
handle. This has a sharp point which can be 
driven anywhere into the sides of the mine. With- 
out candles the mine would be the blackness of 
darkness forever, but there is little danger if one is 
careful and obeys his guide. It is a queer sen- 
sation at first, partly that of being buried alive 
163 



GNADENSEE 

and partly that of carrying the world on your 
shoulders. The darkness is intense but the air is 
cool and sweet ; there is none of the deadly fire- 
damp found in the coal-mines and the purest 
drinking water trickles down through the iron 
seams. 

Your geologic instinct looks continually for 
trilobites and crystals. No reptiles live at these 
deep levels where God has stored the earth with 
wealth. Better for man and more useful in every 
way are these iron mines than the gold fields. It 
is a satisfaction also to know something of the 
earth beneath before you rest in it at last. Imag- 
ination is aroused, you see rocks in stratified for- 
mation, "giant ichthyosaurs splashing in Jurassic 
oceans," and make a theological excursus into Shcol 
and Hades. 

The Psalmist had a terror of becoming "like 
them that go down into the pit," but the experience 
is a great help in the appreciation of Dante. Hell, 
as he explored it with Virgil, lay directly under 
Jerusalem in the form of a hollow inverted cone, 
divided into nine concentric circles, each devoted 
to the punishment of a different class of sins. 

The Ninth Circle was the Frozen Lake of Cocy- 
tus with its four divisions for Traitors to Kindred, 
164 



AN OLD ORE BED 

Country, Friends and Benefactors. This is the low- 
est pit of all. Here is Satan or Lucifer. It was 
no light journey to reach this pit. There was no 
iron truck worked by steam and a humane engi- 
neer in the power-house above. Dante and Virgil 
were seated on the back of Geryon, a monster, 
part dragon, part serpent and part man. Like one 
who had the ague and whose nails are blue al- 
ready, Dante bestrode those "monstrous shoul- 
ders." Down, down they went, through air, 
through water, through fires and lamentations, un- 
til Geryon landed them at the bottom with Satan 
in the very nethermost hell. The Satan of Milton 
is grand, this of Dante repulsive. He has three 
heads, is crunching a sinner in each mouth and 
down his chins 

"trickle the tear-drops and the bloody drivel." 
Judas Iscariot has the hardest time. Poor Judas ! 
Satan has him half swallowed. With head inside 
those awful jaws he plies his legs without. Dante 
was glad to get out of this horrid place. Again he 
bestrode Geryon, that beastly elevator, and when 
the poet came forth into the bright world the 
morning stars were shining. They were the stars 
of Easter. On Good Friday the descent began; on 
Easter morning it was left behind to be fixed in 
165 



GNADENSEE 

literature forevermore. What shall be said of this 
astounding piece of realism? The age has out- 
grown it, the Bible never taught it ; nevertheless it 
is not useless. Sin and retribution are awful facts. 
Evil is not good in the making, but only evil con- 
tinually. The earnestness of Dante's purpose 
makes us tolerant of his awful descriptions. Sin 
is not salacious to him but loathsome and abhor- 
rent ; it is not a mere phase of environment and 
heredity, as we are told to-day, but intensely indi- 
vidualistic. It is no wonder that, as the great poet 
genius walked the streets of Verona, the people 
exclaimed, "Eccovi Vuom die' e siafo alV Inferno." 
(See, there is the man that was in hell !) 

The Bible as well as Dante is appreciated in 
"Brook Pit." It is passing strange that the twenty- 
eighth chapter of Job, which is such a graphic pic- 
ture of ancient mining, should still be applicable to 
the working of this mine in Salisbury. 

"That path no bird of prey knoweth, 
Neither hath the falcon's eye seen it : 
The proud beasts have not trodden it." 

The miner's path is one which is known to 
neither beast nor bird. Man's wisdom and inge- 
nuity are superior to the sights and instincts of the 

animals. 

i66 



AN OLD ORE BED 

It is man alone who penetrates deeply into the 
earth. No birds fly, no animals have their dens in 
these subterranean realms. The miner's world is 
all his own ; he scoops it out for himself and rules 
in it as king-. 

"He cutteth out channels among the rocks ; 
And his eye seeth every precious thing." 

This may refer to man's ability to cut canals and 
tunnels or change the course of rivers, as was done 
at the siege of Babylon. We give the ancients too 
little credit for their knowledge of engineering. 
Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny speak of canals in 
Egypt antedating by thousands of years DeLes- 
sep's great cut at Suez. The history of the Lost 
Arts and Forgotten Sciences has yet to be written. 

The verse, however, probably refers to work un- 
dertaken in the mines for the carrying ofi of water. 
Diodorus Siculus says that when subterranean 
springs were accidentally tapped the workmen would 
construct ducts and channels to carry the danger- 
ous waters to a lower level, just as they were doing 
in "Brook Pit." The miner's eye saw every pre- 
cious thing. He was always on the lookout for 
sapphires and gold-dust. 

And what is the result of all this toil? Why, that 
out of the heart of the earth and out of the pit's 
167 



GNADENSEE 

mouth may be brought forth that with which our 
bread and clothes are purchased. There are two 
forgotten heroes who toil for us and are in danger 
continually. One swings on reeling masts over 
the white surges, the other delves in the heart of 
the earth. In a country like Great Britain, which 
cannot feed her population, the well-being and ex- 
istence of the state depend absolutely on the sail- 
ors and miners. The strike of the anthracite min- 
ers in the coal-fields of Pennsylvania threatened to 
paralyze the industries of the United States. Call 
agriculture the basis of trade and civilization, yet 
the farmer's work is not the most heroic. He 
works in the green fields, under the blue sky and 
the glorious sun. The miner's path and toil are in 
darkness, amid unwholesome gases and in what is 
often a living tomb. 

This old ore bed has many lessons. Men have 
been burrowing here for a century and a half, dig- 
ging the burrow farther and deeper all the time, 
Man is a burrowing animal. He digs a cellar in 
the earth where he may find an equable tempera- 
ture and store his crops. When the house is 
burned the cellar or burrow remains. It was a 
bright thought of Thoreau's, that a man's house 
is only the entrance to his burrow. 
1 68 



AN OLD ORE BED 

In an earlier chapter of this book we were told 
that the Moravians were called "Pitmen" or "Bur- 
rowers." 

The story of underground Christianity is ever 
its most thrilling chapter. The "Pitmen" or "Bur- 
rowers" have a noble ancestry. The most impres- 
sive moments in the Eternal City are not as you 
stand in the splendid churches of the popes or 
amidst the ruins of the Colosseum, but in those sub- 
terranean galleries which underlie the Campagna. 
There are forty-five of these hidden cemeteries 
whose labyrinthine paths extend five hundred and 
forty-five miles. They are, as Dean Stanley aptly 
says, the "Pompeii of ancient Christianity." In 
this city of the dead seven million loculi or resting- 
places have already been found, showing to what 
extent the early Church had grown in less than 
four centuries. As one follows his monkish guide 
with, lighted taper through these narrow, tortuous 
ways, he can see the lone procession coming here 
to worship or bury their dead. That processiou 
was a grander sight than the legions marching 
along the Appian Way on their return from world- 
wide conquest. Tlie magnificent stairway of the 
Vatican has on one side the marbles stripped from 
the now dismantled pagan tombs that line the Via 
169 



GNADENSEE 

Appia for a distance of five miles out from the 
Porta Sebastiano. There are tender, hopeless in- 
scriptions. Hands are clasped in that 

"Vale, vale, eternum vale," 

which speaks of no hereafter. On the opposite 
side are the marbles which have been taken from 
the resting-places of the Christians in the Cata- 
combs. The symbols are those of a deathless joy, 
the palm branch of victory, the olive leaf of peace, 
the picture of the open Bible and of the Shepherd 
carrying the sheep upon his shoulder. There are 
no emblems of suffering, but hope, joy, rest, victo- 
rious forces defeating Roman cruelty and death's 
gloom; a far-seeing faith catching the light of an 
endless day from the dungeon darkness of the 
Catacombs. 

Before we left the mine the obliging foreman de- 
tached for us a beautiful crystal which even there 
was lustrous. So the Bible has nuggets of truth, 
sapphires and gems of infinite value. Set in the 
ore of literature they flash in the white light 
of inspiration. Our personality and character are 
in the ore, too. We need God's fire to set loose 
and purify the metal. As the foreman visits these 
miners so Christ once went and preached to the 
170 



AN OLD ORE BED 

spirits in prison, announcing- to the saints and 
worthies of Old Testament times that now their 
detention and stay in Sheol were ended. Not there 
as doomed or lost souls, but holy men awaiting a 
great deliverance, they went up with him in resur- 
rection triumph to a Paradise beyond the stars. 
This old ore bed showed not only the desirabil- 
ity of resurrection for the saints, but it solved that 
vexed problem of modern society, what to do with 
the sinners. Hell is always a convenient place for 
those whom we do not like. Swedenborg says he 
saw John Calvin in hell. Why should n't the gov- 
ernment buy this old mine and put all the anar- 
chists into it ; let them experiment down there with 
their bombs and infernal machines? The beauty of 
the thing is not only its humanity but its cheapness. 
There would be no possible way of getting out ex- 
cept by the narrow entrance, which four soldiers 
could guard. Let bread be slid down on the truck, 
(water would be abundant) ; let explosives be test- 
ed for heavy ordnance, dynamite being supplied by 
the government. In this way the anarchists would 
advance scientific knowledge and all the living de- 
serve a pension. 



171 



A VILLAGE STREET 



"The elms of Sharon! The very words bring before the 
mind's eye the typical New England street — that long, wide, 
shady stretch upon which the sober, substantial residences 
front, each originally with its home lot running back in- 
definitely, and with a wood lot somewhere in the distant 
rear. The Puritan was faithful to this attractive plan for 
his village plot, wherever he migrated within New Eng- 
land borders ; very seldom is there an example outside of 
it," — Myron B. Benton. 



A VILLAGE STREET 



As one comes up from the Lake of Grace he be- 
holds a village perched" on one of the long terraces 
of the Taconic range. The village does not run 
up the terrace but follows it. Descending the high- 
lands of the Housatonic to the west, you would 
not know there was a village at all, so completely 
is it hidden ; at one point all than can be seen is 
the delicate spire of the Congregational church far 
below in a green valley. One is not prepared for 
the beauty which bursts upon him. Like all sud- 
den revelations, it holds him in a spell. 

It is a most fortunate thing that the fathers of 
the town did not build their village where they 
had surveyed to locate it. In that case there would 
have been a cluster of white houses on a bleak 
wind-swept mountain, but one of the finest streets 
in New England would have been only a cow pas- 
ture. Had they been equally sagacious in allowing 



GNADENSEE 

a railroad to enter the town a mile below the vil- 
lage the magnetism of this age of steel would have 
drawn a population which had caused their village 
to become widely known. And yet there is a val- 
ue in isolation. There are some places you would 
keep just as they are. The tramps cannot reach 
them, great factories do not disturb them, the 
trolley cars do not shake the houses, the sidewalks 
are not black with human units. The restless, trad- 
ing, cursing world is all outside and beyond. 

" 'T is pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat 
To peep at such a world ; to see the stir 
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd." 

Such is Sharon with its broad green street, a street 
which extends for a mile and a half, and the archi- 
tecture of whose oldest houses recalls the days of 
George Washington and George the Third. 

Sharon Street is the Ultima Thule of New Eng- 
land civilization. It looks over into Duchess 
County, that domain of Diedrich Knickerbocker 
where they called the minister the Dominie, built 
stoups to their houses, called mush supazvn and a 
rent in a garment a zvinklc-hawk. Village greens, 
town governments and jealous little democracies 
stop at Sharon Street. 

Of the street in general it may be said that two 
176 



A VILLAGE STREET 

roads, an upper and a lower, on opposite sides of 
the common, run under the elms until they meet 
below the Library. There by the clock-tower an- 
other common begins, stretching away with a sug- 
gestion of abundant room. 

In the summer the street is an oasis of verdure. 
Back of it are long lilac hedges and behind the 
hedges, set in velvet lawns shaded by noble trees, 
are homes of elegance and comfort. 

At the north end of the street the mountains 
burst upon you, Poconnuck with dark, shaggy 
sides, the Riga group and Bear Mountain. Leav- 
ing here the old street, which, running under a hill, 
clings like a limpet to a rock, and climbing some 
high ground to the east, Mount Everett with the 
Catskills can be seen. In the spring, when the 
streams are full and the falls can be heard in the 
still evenings, a walk down to them is not amiss. 
The fresh smell of the foaming water is mingled 
with the fragrance of mint, while the roar of the 
cascades is softened by the sighing of the hem- 
locks in the glen. 

To get the southern view one should walk down 

to the golf links. Here you are on a plateau with 

mountains all around you. It is an ideal spot in 

which to spend a sumnier morning, or when the long 

177 



GNADENSEE 

shadows of the afternoon betoken the approach- 
ing- sunset. Looking down the Webotuck Valley 
there are pastoral views suggestive of English 
landscape ; the ridges billow away, fold on fold, un- 
til they melt in the hazy blue. Cobble Mountain, 
Weeputting or the "tooth mountain," as the In- 
dians called it, dominates the view. Oblong 
Mountain extends for miles and then breaks grand- 
ly at Wassaic. Chestnut Ridge on the further side 
of a parallel valley extends to Dover Plains. 

Sharon Street has a decided air of colonial an- 
tiquity. The oldest house is of brick and was built, 
as the inscription indicates, by John Penoyer in 
1757. George II was then king of England and 
William Pitt his prime minister. The colonies 
were engaged in that momentous struggle which 
was to decide whether Bourbon absolutism or An- 
glo-Saxon freedom should control the destinies of 
this Western continent. It was a time when Wal- 
pole said, "We are forced to ask every morning 
what victory there is, for fear of losing one." Rob- 
ert Clive was laying the foundation of British do- 
minion in India, Watts was testing the power of 
steam, Gray's Elegy had been published only six 
years before. Oliver Goldsmith, toiling in a Lon- 
don garret, was soon to delight the world by pub- 
178 



A VILLAGE STREET 

lishing "The Vicar of Wakefield," and in an "auld 
clay biggin" on the banks of bonnie Doon was to 
be born a bard whose songs were destined to be 
sung wherever the English language is spoken. If 
John Penoyer laying bricks on Sharon Street did 
not feel all this, he knew, when the Colonial army 
had captured Louisburg and Ticonderoga was evac- 
uated, that the world was stirring sleepy Sharon. 
The Governor Smith House, built during the 
Revolution, is not only one of the finest specimens 
of colonial architecture but one of the few historic 
houses now standing in the United States. It is 
a stone structure. Italian workmen were imported 
and used some secret process in tempering their 
mortar. The cement is so hard to-day that the 
walls are in perfect preservation. The house is filled 
with most valuable manuscripts, portraits and fur- 
niture. In the basement are the old slave quarters; 
in the rooms above met some of the most distin- 
guished people of the day. In the garret behind 
the rose window were found the diaries and data 
for that most interesting book, ''Colonial Days and 
Ways." The house has been written about so fully 
that it needs no lengthy description here. Suffice 
it to say that it was the home of John Cotton 
Smith, who served six years in Congress at the be- 
179 



• GNADENSEE 

ginning of the last century and was afterward suc- 
cessively lieutenant-governor and governor of the 
state. 

Nequitimaug, the residence of the Misses Wheel- 
er, stands back among noble trees. A house can 
be built in a year but trees like these require a 
century to grow in. Here is the Stirling Elm, pre- 
eminent in size among his fellows. Here, until the 
storm of 1893, stood a gigantic white ash, the 
Council Tree of the Indians. Long before the set- 
tlement of Sharon by the whites the Wequagnock 
Indians had planned many a wild foray under its 
branches or smoked the pipe of peace. When the 
Rev, Cotton Mather Smith's house stood under 
it the older Indians would gather at certain sea- 
sons to relate their traditions to the younger men 
of the tribe. Mr. Smith, who knew their language 
well, would take advantage of these gatherings to 
preach to them in their own tongue, and he and his 
wife would always see that their red friends had a 
good dinner in the shade of their favorite tree. It 
has come down in unbroken tradition that in 1754 
the tree was just as large as it was fifty years later, 
and saving for a slightly thinner foliage toward the 
last, there was little outward change in its appear- 
ance till it fell. 

180 



A VILLAGE STREET 

It is quite appropriate that the place and grounds 
here should bear the name Nequitimaug, that chief 
and leader of the Sharon Indians. His name ap- 
pears first on the deed by which they transferred 
their lands and he was also a Moravian convert. 

In the Goodwin house opposite is a certificate of 
discharge for Hezekiah Goodwin of the Revolution- 
ary Army, signed by the Father of his Country, 
stating that Corporal Goodwin had been honored 
with the Badge of Merit for his faithful service. 
The government has tried in vain to get this covet- 
ed autograph of Washington's. 

Northward a long avenue of approach ends 
abruptly in a brick mansion whose gables have 
looked out on three centuries. It is one of those 
houses never asking to be described because it 
inevitably compels it. While other things have 
changed it has been a landmark to generations of 
the villagers. If Mary Wilkins Freeman had ever 
seen it, there would have been a quaint story about 
Dutch Doors and Dormer Windows. It is hoped 
that the present interest in colonial architecture 
may long spare this specimen, which links the lives 
of all the presidents, whose walls, true to line and 
plummet, cannot be shaken down and whose doors, 
quaintly hung, swing inward from the middle in 
i8i 



GNADENSEE 

retrospect of ancient hospitality or look out, in 
hope, upon the century to be. 

As one walks down the street to where John 
Penoyer began to lay his bricks, English and Amer- 
ican history from George the Second to Theodore 
Roosevelt, unrolls itself. Unrolls itself ! — unearths 
itself one might also say. Not long ago, in the 
fields near by some copper coins were found. By a 
singular sequence three of them were in the reign 
of the Georges, The first coin was stamped 
Georgius Rex 1724; the second, Georgius II Rex 
1740; the third, Georgius III Rex 1766. Ameri- 
cans do not love these kings of the house of Bruns- 
wick. The first two had characters which -we 
cannot respect, and George the Third was a tyrant, 
whose insolence the colonies resented. Yet there 
were those who never threw off kingly allegiance. 
In the writings of Connecticut women there is a 
very pretty story, "For Her King's Sake," by Miss 
Helen Evertson Smith. The heroine was a mother- 
less girl, sheltered here when Burgoyne's officers 
and troopers were prisoners of war. The scene of 
the story is laid in the "Old Stone House," and the 
girl, who was an ardent Tory, managed to release 
two of the prisoners who wore the king's uniform, 
though, as it proved, they were only too ready to 
182 



A VILLAGE STREET 

desert. For her king's sake she did it, that same 
king whose tea the Boston Mohawks threw into the 
harbor. 

Sharon was an asyhim and city of refuge during 
the Revolution for the harassed patriots along the 
Hudson. They were there in the path of war and 
invasion, but here in the northwestern corner of 
Connecticut, comparatively safe. Litchfield County 
was as strong for independence as Duchess was for 
Toryism and the king. Ever since Oliver Wolcott 
of Litchfield signed the Declaration of Independ- 
ence and its citizens brought the leaden statue of 
George III from Bowling Green, New York, and 
melted it into bullets to fight the battles of the 
Revolution, the air of this old mountain county 
had not suited Tory lungs. If Burgoyne's Hes- 
sians had made a raid into Litchfield County they 
might have fared even worse than they did at Ben- 
nington. Sufftce it to say that Sharon Street was 
filled with refugees, not "kings in exile," but the 
king's rebellious subjects. Here came the Van 
Rensselaers and the Livingstons from their manors 
on the Hudson. There was quite a colony, people 
of rank and quality. There were probably more 
people on Sharon Street then than now. 

There is a strange interest which attaches to 
183 



GNADENSEE 

these patriot refugees. Patroons and lords of the 
manor could be patriots as well as Tories. The 
Livingstons were one of the most distinguished 
families in early American history and related to 
people here. Livingston Manor, granted to Robert 
Livingston in Columbia and Duchess Counties, 
fronted for twelve miles along the Hudson and ex- 
tended back thirty miles from the rivei. The 
owner was a man of unusual cultivation and force 
of character. Wealthy New Yorkers to-day have 
yachts moored by splendid estates on the same 
noble river, which carry them to the very ends of 
the earth. These old lords of the manor had their 
sloops to carry furs to New York and bring back 
costly plate and tapestries which had come from 
over the sea. 

The burial of Philip Livingston in 1749 is thus 
described in a journal of the day. There was a 
double ceremony, one in New York city, the other 

at the Livingston Manor. 

"In the city, the lower rooms of most of the houses in 
Broad Street, wliere he resided, were thrown open to re- 
ceive visitors. A pipe of wine was spiced for the occasion, 
and to each of the eight bearers, with a pair of gloves, 
mourning ring, scarf and handkerchief, a monkey-spoon^ was 

^ This was so called from the figure of an ape or mon- 
key which was carved in solido at the extremity of the 
handle. It differed from a common spoon in having a 
circular and very shallow bowl. 
184 



A VILLAGE STREET 

given. At the manor these ceremonies were all repeated, 
another pipe of wine was spiced, and besides the same 
presents to the bearers, a pair of black gloves and a 
handkerchief were given to each of the tenants. The whole 
expense was said to amount to five hundred pounds." 

Another Philip Livingston was one of the sign- 
ers of the Declaration of Independence. 

There is a great historical novel yet to be writ- 
ten. Its title will be "The Patroon." ' In these old 
feudal families along the Hudson the novelist will 
find abundant material and inspiration. 

Sharon Street has not only an air of colonial 
antiquity, but of modern enlightenment and ten- 
derness. Its library, built of the gray limestone 
found in the township, was given by Maria H. 
Hotchkiss, in memory of her husband, Benjamin 
Berkley Hotchkiss. The generosity of the origi- 
nal gift has lately been equaled by an ample en- 
dowment. The plan of the library is that of a 
St. Anthony's Cross, Two bay rooms used for 
reading are on either side of the nave, which is the 
library proper. The panels of stained glass in the 
north room bear the names of Homer, Virgil, Mo- 
liere and Goethe, with Dante's stern face looking 
down from the central one. They represent the 
genius of universal culture. The south room com- 

^ The Dutch for patron. 

185 



GNADENSEE 

memorates the genius of the EngHsh-speaking 
race. The panels here have the names of Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, Milton and Frankhn, the central win- 
dow enshrining the face of our beloved Longfellow. 
Whoever reads the works of these poets is at home 
in all literatures and all languages. They show the 
difference between literature and information. 

After the many benefits of a village library are 
conceded, the people who use it aright are rela- 
tively few. The average American reads only news- 
papers. The people who know what is in a library, 
who visit it, take out books and look up refer- 
ences, are few. To use a library aright one must 
fall in love with it, must wish at times that instead 
of earning money for his daily bread he might live 
in an alcove of books and have his meals sent in to 
him. A village library is the proper place for an 
informal lecture or a reading-class. It is the post- 
graduate department and annex of the public 
school, a kind of university extension course, an 
asylum and place of refreshment for those who 
have been mentally starved. The building is only 
a skeleton without those books which are its life 
and soul. With books you hold the keys of all 
culture, can travel in all lands, hear the mule bells 
tinkle on the hills of Spain, climb the slopes of 

i86 



A VILLAGE STREET 

Olivet and see auroras flash around the pole. The 
best books make us love and hate ; in rare moments 
they inspire. Those who love them may never be 
sages or heroes but they cannot be ignoble. 

Yet we have somewhat against the modern li- 
brary. It has produced Hctionitis, a new disease, 
which arrests mental growth and leaves no relish 
for the good old classics. Our fathers read Rasselas, 
Pope and Cowper. 

The tenderness of Sharon Street is its Clock- 
tower and Cemetery. The stone tower would be 
an architectural ornament to any village in Amer- 
ica, and there is many a city park and public square 
which would be only too glad to have it set down 
amid its lawns and flowers. Erected in 1884 to the 
memory of Mrs. Emily Butler Ogden Wheeler, its 
melodious bell peals out the hours. On the back of 
the tower is the inscription 

"Hours are golden links; God's token 
Reaching Heaven ; but one by one 

Take them lest the chain be broken 
Ere the pilgrimage be done." 

The tower is now the horologe and dial of the 
street. Every w^eek the clock is set exactly by the 
standard time at Washington. There is a legend 
of old dials on the church spire opposite, but mod- 
ern carpentry has long ago eflfaced them. There is 
187 



GNADENSEE 

no envy as there can be no rivalry. Nothing is 
weather-beaten yet on the tower. No medieval ogres 
salute you. One misses the cock that crew when 
Peter denied his Lord, the holy apostles who come 
out to parade just before the hour, but the Hme- 
stone so new and fresh is older than the tower of 
Babel. The tower says, "Already I have tolled the 
death and struck the dawn of a century. Long 
after you are gone and the dust gathers on mouldy 
tomes I shall stand amid my trees and verdure. 
Listen then to my lay and legend." 

DAS LIED VON DER GLOCKE 

Where the elm trees arch their branches 

To form a long arcade 

The village clock-tower standeth 

With holiest memories laid — 

A pile of soaring beauty 

Upon the green old street, 

To raise to higher levels 

And make our life complete. 

The lancets in its gray v^^alls 

Let the shafted sunlight through, 

And the great bell, in the belfry. 

Peals the hours, deep toned and true. 

It seems some old pagoda. 

Built o'er a sacred shrine 

With limestone from the quarry 

Of a far Silurian time; 

Twin dragons guard the entrance 

And, through the studded door, 

The sacristan goes often 

To wind the wondrous tower. 

i88 



A VILLAGE STREET 

Like Giotto's Campanile 
By Brunelleschi's Dome, 
Hard by the village churches 
Stands this symphony in stone; 
The white doves crowd its windows, 
The belfry pigeon weaves 
Her nest, all unaffrighted, 
Beneath its sounding eaves. 

They say that once the dials 
Upon the village church 
Grew envious of its beauty 
Then hid their face and wept; 
The noonday bell was silent, 
The curfew ceased to toll, 
But now, in spire and clock-tower, 
They answer soul to soul. 

Like grave muezzin standing, 
Who callest unto prayer. 
Thy echoes break the stillness 
Of the palpitating air; 
The thoughtless stop to listen. 
The good are better made 
Who read the hours' inscription. 
Half hidden in the shade. 

In Schafifhausen's old cathedral 
The legend, on the bell,* 
Is that the bolts of thunder 
Were harmless when they fell ; 
Thy tones disarm our terror — 
And oft in holy hour 

* Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango. "I call the 
living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunderbolts." It is 
an old belief current in Germany that the ringing of bells 
breaks the thunder-cloud and renders it harmless. 

189 



' GNADENSEE 

Loved voices, long remembered, 
Call from the solemn tower : 
The wedding and the funeral 
Both get their time from thee, 
A horologe of mortal life, 
A voice of destiny. 

Thou art a hoary sentinel 
Upon the coast of time, 
To watch the heavens' starry march 
And hear their music fine; 
And when the great meridian 
Bends o'er our heads at noon 
The city of the presidents 
And clock-tower are in tune. 

Thou art the sad-faced trumpeter 

Of winter's spectral reign, 

Till red suns climbing up the sky 

Bring choirs of June again ; 

Then o'er the lawns, through arching trees, 

Thy four white faces show, 

Where the elms lift towers of verdure 

And the lilac hedges blow. 

Thy red roof burns at sunset 
When the dying day is warm, 
And through the long niglit shadows 
Faint glimmers to the dawn — 
A dawn of ampler beauty, 
For a century has whirled 
Whose jubilate pealing 
Rings o'er a glad new world ; 
A world wViose weal and glory 
Makes increase with the suns 
While dials tell their story 
And sand in hour-glass runs. 
190 



A VILLAGE STREET 

A step from the village street and, one is in the 
cemetery. With its amphitheater of mountains, a 
stranger would fain be buried here. Back to this 
old churchyard the wanderers come at last from all 
these hills and vales, from western mountains and 
from tropic gulf, to rest amid the scenes of their 
childhood. l"he committal is read over them and 
the tear falls that a place so naturally beautiful 
should have such a tender sadness. What Fanny 
Kemble said of Lenox churchyard is true of this : 
"I will not rise to trouble any one if they will let 
me sleep there. I will ask only to be permitted, 
once in a while, to raise my head, and look upon 
this glorious scene." 

One of the old-time customs on Sharon Street 
was the observance of the birthdays of elderly peo- 
ple. There were certain individuals belonging to 
the old families who literally held court on that 
day. Friends, neighbors, relatives, people from out 
of town, all came to pay their tribute of veneration 
and love. It was an event eagerly looked forward 
to, a tender survival of old-school manners and po- 
liteness. Not age but worthy age levied requisition 
and received its homage. Why not so everywhere? 
The elderly people are the chroniclers of village 
life, links in the tender chain of tradition. The 
191 



GNADENSEE 

passing of such souls is like the uprooting of noble 
trees. 

A quaint convex window, much prized by artists, 
on the east side of the street was the outlook of a 
godly clockmaker whose faith was an inheritance 
of the famous Apostle to the Indians. It is Eliot's 
window. 

In early summer the street is at its best. First 
comes the bursting into bloom of the lilac hedges 
and on the air is wafted the scents of some old- 
fashioned gardens. The elms erect towers of verdure 
and tipped with leaves to every utmost twig sway 
in aerial grace. Looking upon them one can un- 
derstand that reverence the Celtic Druids had for 
trees and how the quick-witted Greeks peopled 
their groves with dryads and gods of the wood. 
These elms are seers and prophets too. They seem 
to say, "We have the wisdom of Confucius and Soc- 
rates." 

Later the houses are full of life — city guests ar- 
rive and those who have traveled widely. Since 
the Spanish War New England life has taken on a 
certain languor and love of ease. Out on the 
evening air floats the music of a mandolin. A 
Spanish lady is playing arias and here on this old 
street with its Puritan strictness and ideals one 
thinks of 



A VILLAGE STREET 

"A land of lutes and witching tones, 
Of silver, onyx, opal stones; 
A lazy land, wherein all seems 
Enchanted into endless dreams." 

The charm of the street is in its far-away views. 
Often walled in so that you cannot see, one ap- 
preciates the privilege of reveling in space and 
distance. Harsh lines are not seen. You look 
down and off on beauty. Some visitors return to 
the street year by year. As the past is not a mem- 
ory but a part of yourself, so this street runs into 
the very life of the soul. Here the meridian's curve 
is beauty's line. A little village nestles among the 
Taconic Hills where talk is not of stocks but views, 
where tardy progress is frightened by automobiles 
and cheap trippers do not come. A German writer 
has said that every Englishman is an island, a taunt 
at national prejudice resented by the lords of the 
Seven Seas ; but no man whose home is under the 
village elms of New England can be taunted with 
his country birth. He is sure the world never had 
an ideal like this. 

In the winter the old street is lonely. There is 

no insect life ; the song-birds have flown. For a 

mile the great houses are closed. With no faces or 

lights in the windows you seem to be walking in a 

193 



GNADENSEE 

Campo Santo. A house is not a home if it is only 
occupied in summer. There are compensations, 
however. No leafy trees obstruct the view. The 
anatomy of the mountains can be seen. At the end 
of the clear, cold days they swim in purple light ; 
every morning you look out on Switzerland 
through the diaphanous air. When the gray goose 
begins to fly southward and the fierce northwest 
blasts howl around the house, you think of the great 
white silence which has settled down over the 
mountains and tundras of Alaska. That silence 
comes, to the old street, but it is a briefer robing. 



A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 



"Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve 
He taught, but first he folwed it himselve." 

— "The Canterbury Tales," Chaucer, 

"Whereas my birth and spirit rather took 

The way that takes the Town : 
Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring Book, 

And wrap me in a Gown : 
I was entangled in a World of strife, 
Before I had the power to change my life." 

George Herbert. 



A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 



The parish of the Congregational church in 
Sharon, Connecticut, inckided originally much of 
the land around the Lake of Grace. It was the day 
of long pastorates, large parishes and commanding 
influence on the part of the clergy. No history of 
a New England town could be written without 
mention of its clergy. Among the pastors of 
the Colonial and Revolutionary period few, if 
any, had a more direct participation in the stirring 
events of those days than the Rev. Cotton Mather 
Smith. His name reveals his ancestry, for he was 
related to all the Mathers and the Rev. John Cot- 
ton of Boston. As one of his ancestors was a 
major-general it was natural that he should be a 
pastor of the church militant. While a college stu- 
dent he was associated with Jonathan Edwards, in 
charge of a school which had been established 
among the Indians at Stockbridge, and was re- 
197 



GNADENSEE 

markable even among them for his feats of agility 
and strength. 

One of the most notable events in his earlier 
ministry was the visit of Whitefield in June, 1770, 
The great itinerant preacher had gone up the North 
River as far as Albany and Schenectady, preaching 
in all the towns and villages and, returning, had 
reached Sharon. Here, as elsewhere, there was 
considerable opposition to his being allowed to 
speak in the meeting-house, but Parson Smith's in- 
fluence was on the liberal side and the church 
doors were opened. For the benefit of the many 
strangers who came, an extensive scaffolding of 
seats was erected around the church. Whitefield 
was suffering from a severe attack of asthma, but 
Madam Smith spent the entire night in nursing 
him. It seemed at times as if he would die before 
morning, but after a little sleep he was able to 
preach a sermon all the more impressive because 
he had been so near the eternal world. His voice 
had not failed. It was the vox celeste, that same 
voice the colliers of Bristol had heard as the tears 
made white channels down their grimy cheeks, 
which drew the crowds at the Haymarket, going 
forth at candle light in the London fog, a voice 
heard on the moors of Scotland, and in those deep 

198 



A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 

underground passages, where the Cornish miner 
listens to the sobbing of the sea above him, a voice 
which had in it the Hghtning of the Apocalypse and 
the sweet persuasiveness of a seraph. Three 
months later he died at Newburyport, but not be- 
fore sending to Parson Smith and his wife a most 
tender letter of thanks and farewell. 

The Revolutionary War found Parson Smith in 
the maturity of his powers, and, like the Congre- 
gational clergy generally, without one particle of 
Toryism. His sermons, prayers and hymns at this 
time breathe a martial spirit. When the news of 
the battle of l^exington reached Sharon, on a Sab- 
bath morning. Parson Smith announced it from his 
pulpit and so infused the spirit of patriotic resist- 
ance into his flock that at the close of the service 
a company of one hundred men lined up on the 
village street, prepared to march to the scene of ac- 
tion. But he was not content with arousing oth- 
ers. During the momentous campaign of 1775 he 
was a chaplain in the Northern army, serving the 
Fourth Connecticut Regiment, which, under Col- 
onel Hinman, marched to Ticonderoga. Here he 
was dangerously ill of camp fever. 

There is a thrilHng story connected with one of 
his sermons. It was on a Sunday in October, 1777, 
199 



GNADENSEE 

after the terrible reverses to the Continental army. 
Burgoyne was advancing from^ the north, and the 
patriot cause seemed all but lost. Parson Smith 
ascended the pulpit and announced his text, 
"Watchman, what of the night? The watchman 
said, The morning cometh" (Is. 21 : 11, 12). With 
great sympathy he spoke of the late reverses until 
the stern faces of his Puritan congregation were 
bathed in tears. Then his tone changed. "Our 
weakness," he said, "is the Lord's opportunity. He 
has permitted our past humiliation that our sins 
might be punished and that he might show us that 
he is mighty to save. . . . Behold ! the morning 
now cometh. I see its beams already gilding the 
mountain tops. Its brightness is already bursting 
over all the land." The scene that followed is best 
described in the words of the family tradition and 
authorship : 

"He closed his Bible and stood with uplifted hand, 
while a silence, as of expectation, fell alike upon the 
preacher and hearers. Then, during the solemn hush 
which preceded the benediction, could be distinguished 
from afar the hasty clatter of a horseman dashing into the 
village from the north. All knew that the sacred stillness 
of a New England Sabbath would not be broken without 
good reason. The eager horseman makes directly . for 
the church. Hope is triumphant over fear, but with hope 
is mingled terror, and anxious eyes blaze out from 
blanched faces as the rider, springing from his horse, 
200 



A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 

enters the church, his spurs clanking along the uncarpeted 
floor and up the pulpit stairs. The parson, his face flush- 
ing with the joy of a hope fulfilled, read only the three 
words, 'Burgoyne has surrendered,' and then burst into 
honorable tears. The next moment, calmed and solemn, 
he said, 'Let us thank God for this great mercy.' And, 
moved by a common impulse, the whole congregation rose 
to the Puritan posture of prayer — the erect posture of 
the Ironsides, who prayed and fought and kept their 
powder dry." — Colonial Days and Ways. 

In those days the Webotuck Valley was a vast 
wheat-field and granary for the Revohitionary 
army. At one time when the crop was endangered 
by the heavy rains, Parson Smith dismissed his 
congregation to save it, himself and family leading 
in the work. The soldiers who fought the battles 
of freedom must be fed. 

There is a beautiful story that when Sharon was 
visited by a scourge of the small-pox in the winter 
of 1784-85 and one-third of the population had the 
dreaded disease, Parson Smith and his devoted 
wife "spent their entire time in close attention up- 
on the sick and dying." George Herbert says that 
"The Parson's Completeness" requires him to 
practise the healing art and that the Parson's wife 
must be a mother and nurse of the sick. 

With Dr. Bellamy, Parson Smith divided the 
honor of making his home a school of the prophets. 
201 



GNADENSEE 

That was before the days of theological seminaries 
and, in some respects, better. 

The good man was ordained in Sharon, August 
28, 1755, and died November 27, 1806, in the sev- 
enty-sixth year of his age and the fifty-second of 
his ministry. In 1805 he preached his half-century 
sermon from the text, "Now lettest thou thy serv- 
ant depart in peace, .... for mine eyes have 
seen thy salvation" (Luke 2 : 29, 30). 

We smile at these old New England divines, 
with their long sermons and grim theology, who 
were willing to be damned for the glory of God and 
wanted you to be, but had it not been for them, 
we might now be living under a king. They in- 
vented systems of theology, reveled in discussions 
on the divine decrees, man's depravity and moral 
inability. They rode over these hills to adjust and 
vindicate the moral government of God, to prove 
the freedom of the will, even if it was n't free. It 
may do to smile at them from our safe distance, 
but if we could venture to argue with them, they 
would put us in their vest pocket, for they were 
giants in thought and intellect. The moral lever- 
age of our reforms all comes from them. 



202 



SHEKOMEKO 



"Into the Silent Land ! 

Ah! who shall lead us thither? 

Clouds in the evening sky more darkly gather, 

And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand. 

"Tender morning-visions 

Of beauteous souls ! The Future's pledge and band ! 

Who in Life's battle firm doth stand, 

Shall bear Hope's tender blossoms 

Into the Silent Land !" 

From the German of Salis. 



SHEKOMEKO 



There are three drives in America which are 
famous and one which is remarkable. The surf 
booms and breaks against a rock-bound coast at 
Cohasset, where the Jerusalem Road winds be- 
tween the villas and the sea; the genius of Holmes 
and Hawthorne broods over a roadway between 
Lenox and Stockbridge, which fashion would fain 
preempt with its properties and four-in-hands ; on 
the heights above the Hudson from Irvington to 
Tarrytown is a drive for which the picturesque 
and historic are rival claimants ; but who ever heard 
of the road to Shekomeko? Yet it is remarkable. 
From the Lake of Grace it winds through 'The 
Oblong" over and down the mountain. What 
mountain? That long ridge, variously called Win- 
chell, Silver Mountain, Delavern Hill, but which 
must inevitably be crossed to reach Shekomeko. 
But why go to Shekomeko? First, because on the 
ridge referred to, the whole range of the Catskills 
205 



GNADENSEE 

bursts in a silence-compelling view, real mountains 
these, where legend has stopped and lodged; 
second, because there are more documents about 
Shekomeko than the critics have discovered in the 
Pentateuch ; third, because around its old Indian 
village and Bethel, three confluent streams of civil- 
ization met, the Dutch, the Palatine and the Eng- 
Hsh; fourth, because the Moravians came here and 
Count Zinzendorf; fifth, because when the diaries 
of the missionaries, now kept in the archives of 
the Moravian Church, are translated we shall have 
a Shekomeko literature ; sixth, because Shekomeko 
is one of the classic loci of Christianity, like Phil- 
ippi, lona and Plymouth Rock; seventh, because it 
is a bridge over which we pass from the old world 
to the new, a watershed of church history, with dis- 
parting streams and influences. Yet, let us not be 
too sure in our identification. People put the ac- 
cent where they please in pronouncing the word 
and there is some latitude allowed in the spelling. 
Shekomeko is both a railway station, a little 
sleepy hamlet among the fertile hills of Duchess 
County, New York (we prefer to omit the "t" since 
the county, though settled by the Dutch, was 
named after the Duchess of York), and also the site 
of an old Indian village a few miles away. 
206 



SHEKOMEKO 

One thing is true about Shekomeko : the road to 
it is steep, remarkably steep in places. Horses 
have as hard a time as in that straggling settlement 
in the sands of Amagansett, Long Island, where the 
stage driver blows a bugle to wake the people up, 
and which the early settlers called Pantigo, because 
they had to pant and go to get through. It was 
on a hot, dusty August afternoon that we drove to 
the house of a man who knows more about Shek- 
omeko than any Moravian living, the curator of 
the monument there. From his peach orchard at 
Ononda Farm we could see the white shaft in a 
field below. It was not deemed best to visit the 
monument until the next morning, as it was a mile 
distant and the light was fading. Yet the eyes 
would wander that way. Why should they not? 
Here was the most fascinating landscape in Duch- 
ess County. The meadow land was rich and mel- 
low. In front was the long, rugged brow of Stis- 
sing Mountain, covered with forest as dense as 
when the Mohican hunters pierced its gloom. At 
its foot lay the Stissing chain of lakes and placid 
Halcyon. The associations and memories of the 
silent past seemed to brood over all and then fade 
with the white monument into the evening gloom, 
the Abenddunkd of the Moravian. 



GNADENSEE 

Long into the evening we talked, for the spell of 
the place was on us, and the genial host read from 
his own writings the story of a Moravian heroine. 

In the morning we drove down to inspect the 
monument. The place of the Mission House was 
pointed out, Zinzendorf's hut, the Indian Village, 
the Missionaries' Field, the Indian Brethren's 
Field, the "sweat-house" and other sites. It was 
the custom of the Moravians to gather their Indian 
converts into a new village, where they could be 
separated as much as possible from evil influences. 
Every mission station was thus a kind of Christian 
commune, with the individuality of the Moravian 
system — a venture whose faith was heroic, but 
whose existence was transient. 

There is in the Moravian archives an original 
drawing of Shekomeko, as it appeared in 1745. 
The most interesting spot then, as now, was the 
Brethren's Burying-ground. In one corner of it 
is the present monument and Biittner's grave. 

The hero of Shekomeko is Gottlob Biittner, al- 
though it is not the fashion of Kipling and the mod- 
ern school to praise such. 

Born in Prussia, commissioned by Count Zin- 
zendorf to labor among the Mohicans at Sheko- 
meko, crossing the Hudson, with his bride, at 
208 



SHEKOMEKO 

Rhinebeck, he labored with remarkable success. 
But just as things were getting into shape, a cruel 
persecution arose. It affected Biittner sorely and 
was literally an arrow in the good man's heart. We 
cannot here go into a detailed account of the re- 
peated summons, hearings, by which legally, 
though cruelly and most unjustly, the good man 
was harried and hastened to his death. It is a mat- 
ter of record for those who care to follow it. Biitt- 
ner had, for a long time, been suffering from a pul- 
monary complaint and the arduous journeys and 
repeated examinations caused by the persecution of 
the civil authorities, developed hemorrhages which 
became more frequent, until, on February 23, 1745, 
he left the cross on which he had been crucified 
and entered into rest. Like Bruce he was robed 
in white by Indian converts and buried among 
them. 

After resting for a hundred years in an unknown 
grave the present monument was erected and the 
"First Litany for Burials" read over the mission- 
ary's remains. 

In his Personal Narrative, Humboldt describes 

the pleasure he felt on discovering the Southern 

Cross. He says, "How often have we heard our 

guides exclaim in the savannahs of Venezuela, or 

209 



GNADENSEE 

in the desert extending from Lima to Truxillo, 
'Midnight is past, the Cross begins to bend' ! " 
If the Hterary man in America is at a disadvantage 
because' there are no folk-lore and middle ages to 
fall back upon, no chanson de Roland and great 
Roman empire in the background, there is an ideal 
which is higher. When this country was settled 
the midnight of the world was past, the Cross had 
begun to bend. Not a little of this idealism was 
the gift of Moravian missionaries. 



2IO 



THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK 



THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PEQUOTS 

"Undaunted, on their foes they fiercely flew ; 

As fierce the dusky warriors crowd the fight ; 

Despair inspires ; to combat's face they glue ; 

With groans and shouts, they rage, unknowing flight, 

And close their sullen eyes, in shades of endless night. 

"Indulge, my native land, indulge the tear 
That steals, impassioned, o'er a nation's doom. 

To me, each twig from Adam's stock is near, 
And sorrows fall upon an Indian's tomb. 

"And, O ye chiefs ! in yonder starry home. 

Accept the "humble tribute of this rhyme. 

Your gallant deeds, in Greece or haughty Rome, 

By Maro sung, or Homer's harp sublime. 

Had charmed the world's wide round and triumphed 

over time." 

— President Dwight. 



THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK 



One day in the middle of April, 1902, a tourist 
found himself in a little store and post-office on the 
borders of the Scatacook country. Among the 
usual crowd of loungers was a man with marked 
Indian features — the high cheek-bones, straight 
black hair, copper skin, slender fingers and piercing 
black eyes revealed his lineage. He was the mail- 
carrier between Gaylordsville and Bull's Bridge. 
He said he lived on the Scatacook Reservation and 
would delight to act as guide for the stranger. 
Crossing the cataracts of the Housatonic at Bull's 
Bridge, here a mad, turbulent river, the west road 
along the river soon came to a shoulder of rock 
covered with hemlocks, passing which two cas- 
cades came tumbling down the clifif. Here, with a 
wooded escarpment of mountain behind and the 
Housatonic in front, was the Reservation. Strung 
along were a few unpainted, one-story houses, in 
213 



GNADENSEE 

which Hved about fifteen souls. Each house had a 
little patch of cultivated ground. At present there 
are nearly one hundred persons scattered through 
the state, who claim some relationship with the 
Scatacook tribe, but to derive any benefit from the 
small fund one must live on the Reservation. 

Long ago the wise men of the tribe, foreseeing 
that their name and place would disappear unless 
something were done, applied to the state for aid 
and protection. A tract of arable land along the 
river, with six hundred acres of rough woodland 
for firewood, was set off to them; but as the In- 
dians were not inclined to farming, the alluvial land 
was sold and its proceeds converted into a fund, 
which is administered by the courts of the state. 
The Reservation, therefore, has reverted to its 
original proprietors, the Indians and the rattle- 
snakes. 

Before ascending the mountain, the Indian in- 
troduced us to Rachel Mahwe, a granddaughter 
of Eunice Mahwe; "Aunt Eunice," as she was 
called in her day. She lived to the great age of 
one hundred and three. Rachel was ninety-three, 
and, but for deafness and rheumatism, seemed well 
and vigorous. 

With the Indian guide we now made the ascent 
214 



THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK 

of the wild, rocky height extending westward to 
the state Hne. This tract is all that now remains of 
what was once the hunting-grounds and corn-lands 
of the Scatacooks. The view from the summit was 
superb. The Housatonic valley, here narrowed 
and contracted, is laid open. Kent village lies to 
the north ; wild foaming rapids extend to the south 
where the river, chafing along its rocky gorge, is 
joined by the Webotuck; in front are the Litchfield 
Hills. Often, very often, must Indian eyes have 
looked ofif from this spot. Over these mountains 
the wild deer had been hunted and even now in 
winter their tracks can occasionally be seen in the 
snow. 

Stretched out on the rocks, with the wild, free 
air blowing over the ledges and the taciturn Indian 
silhouetted against the sky, there was a temptation 
to indulge in reverie and historic guessing. Who 
were the Scatacooks and whence had they come? 
One opinion is that they were a part of King Phil- 
ip's men, driven westward after the "Great Swamp 
Fight" by the whites, who were bent on their ex- 
termination. Finding security at last in the im- 
passable thickets and morasses of Swamp River, 
New York, one day when chasing the deer, as 
evening set in, they found themselves on the sum- 
215 



GNADENSEE 

mit of a wooded mountain. Below on the banks 
of a beautiful river were lands, suitable for planting 
corn. They called the river Housatcnuc, for they 
had come "over the mountain," and the corn lands 
Pishgachtigok, for they lay at "the confluence of two 
streams." 

There is another ethnic guess, which is that the 
Scatacooks were Pequots. If this be true, their ex- 
istence and preservation is one of the most pathetic 
stories in Indian annals. The Pequots were the 
bravest, fiercest tribe in all New England. His- 
torians have agreed that their destruction by the 
whites was an unmerited and ruthless slaughter. 
It reads like a chapter out of the book of Joshua, 
save that there was no divine command for the ex- 
termination. Granted that the Indian is cruel and 
vindictive, that he is a stranger to those manly and 
chivalrous sentiments which are the inheritance of 
the Anglo-Saxon, there is yet no evidence that the 
Pequots were the aggressors. 

The Pequots were in two forest forts, one of 
which was located by a force of white men, under 
Captains Mason and Underbill. The garrison was 
sound asleep. Let Mather's Magnalia describe 
what followed: 



2i6 



THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK 

"As they approaclied within a rod of the fort a dog bark- 
ing awakened another Cerberus; an Indian that stood 
centinel, who immediately cried out, Wannux, Wannux, 
i. e. English, English. However, the courageous captains 
presently found a way to enter the fort, and thereupon 
followed a bloody encounter, wherein several of the 
English were wounded, and many of the indians killed ; 
but the zvigivams or houses which filled the fort consist- 
ing chiefly of combustible mats we set fire to them, and 
presently retiring out of the fort surrounded it. The fire 
by the advantage of the wind carried all before it ; and such 
horrible confusion overwhelmed the salvages, that many of 
them were broiled unto death in the revenging flames; 
many of them climbing to the tops of the pallizadoz, were 
a fair mark for the mortiferous bullets there; and many 
of them that had the resolution to issue forth, were slain 
by the English that stood ready to bid 'em welcome; nor 
were there more than two English men that lost their lives 
in the heat of the action." 

This was in 1637, forty years before King Phil- 
ip's War. None of the Indians had guns. With a 
raging lire behind, in which their wives and childreil 
were roasted to death, surrounded by a merciless 
band of English, with guns and rapiers, the Pe- 
quots asked no quarter but crawled up to the pali- 
sades and shot their useless arrows. In an hour, 
from four to six hundred were burned to death; 
"brought down to hell," as Mather says. One hun- 
dred and fifty of them were warriors, the rest old 
men, women and children. 

One's sympathies are all with the Pequots. 
217 



GNADENSEE 

These "devils" and salvages were at least human 
beings. 'T was bad enough to have wife and chil- 
dren barbecued, but worse to have this relentless 
old Puritan write the obituary. Not a word of pity 
or admiration for a valor that Homer's heroes 
never equaled. A bear bereft of her whelps calls 
forth our pity. A man who dies defending his wife 
and children doth all that valor can. 

Most of the remaining- Pequots were literally 
hunted to death. Women and children were made 
slaves, some being kept in Connecticut, others sent 
to Massachusetts and the West Indies ; a servitude 
soon terminated by death. Thirty men were put 
"on board a vessel, which proved a Charon's ferry- 
boat unto them, for it was found the quickest way 
to feed the fishes with 'em." 

In the history of Guilford it is related how a Pe- 
quot chief with a few men were discovered. They 
hid at the end of the cape which juts out from the 
eastern side of the harbor, but Uncas, that sleuth- 
hound and disreputable ally of the English, was on 
their trail. He sent some of his men to search 
them out. Driven from their refuge, the Pequots 
swam across the harbor to be shot, as they landed, 
by the Mohicans. Uncas cut off the head of the 
Pequot chief and lodged it in the branches of an 
218 



THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK 

oak, where it hung for years. The place, to this 
day, is known as Sachem's Head. 

There was one more swamp fight near Greenfield 
Hill. The Pequots were betrayed and surrounded. 
The last picked men of the tribe, now greatly re- 
duced in numbers, stood at bay. The English, 
with their terrible guns, circled the swamp. It was 
death or surrender, but the Indians preferred death. 
All night long they crept up to the border of the 
swamp and shot their arrows at the English. Then 
in the dim gray of the morning they made their 
last wild dasli for freedom. There was a heavy 
fog and in the furious fighting some got through 
and escaped. What became of these survivors was 
never known. Their fate and destiny remains as 
strange as that of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. 
There is a tradition that they made their way to 
the mountains of North Carolina and when the 
news of King Philip's War reached them, started 
north to strike one more blow at the hated Eng- 
lish. It seems more probable that they came from 
the Sound up the Housatonic valley and remained 
here, hidden in the forests of Scatacook. For years 
the Indians on the Reservation used to make their 
journeys to the Sound and that country along the 
salt seashore which was the old Pequot fatherland. 
219 



GNADENSEE 

It is said that the Scatacooks are the union of two 
tribes. Tliat Mohicans from Shekomeko and We- 
quadnach came and joined them we know. Why 
may not the earlier and older tribe have been that 
Pequot remnant which escaped? 

The Moravians visited these Indians as early as 
1742. They did what the Puritans of Connecticut 
failed to do, made these haughty sons of the forest 
docile and earnest Christians. The missionaries 
wrote the name of the station Pachgatgoch. We 
stumble at the word, but in Bethlehem it is pro- 
nounced as easily as Kent people say Macedonia. 
It is surprising how much hterature there is about 
this old mission in the archives of the Moravian 
Church. There is a rich historical field here, mate- 
rial for an ample volume. The Pachgatgoch mis- 
sion flourished long after the one at Wequadnach 
was abandoned. 

There was a strong desire to go down to the 
"confluence of the streams." Descending the 
mountain together, the guide left us at Rachel 
Mahwe's. In the little burial-ground, by the mur- 
muring Housatonic, were Indian graves, some with 
rude stones, others with none at all. Indian names 
remain for the river and the Reservation, but the 
Indians themselves have well-nigh perished. Only 
220 



THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK 

a mixed progeny remains. In that great building 
at the Buffalo Exposition, dedicated to those ethnic 
peoples who have contributed something to human 
progress, much importance was given to the In- 
dian races, but when one knows the real history 
there is often, as here, a pathos which cannot be 
told. One thing seems strange, and that is that the 
mission Indians of California should be so inter- 
esting, but the mission Indians at our very doors, 
a nobler, braver stock, so neglected. Perhaps some 
future Helen Hunt Jackson will rescue these at 
Scatacook from oblivion and give the world the 
story of the mission. 

Because the Indian folk-lore of New England 
has perished beyond recovery, every lingering le- 
gend has the greater value. In Northwestern Con- 
necticut there is a place called "Hemlock Hollow," 
where the snow and ice rarely melt. According to 
a Scatacook legend the "Hollow" was the torture 
ground of the spirits of bad Indians. Tlie soul 
of any one who died within its shadow could never 
escape their demon clutches. The fell spirits some- 
times escaped for short periods and then raised the 
fiercest storms. Many lives were lost here. So su- 
perstition lingers and is perpetuated to frighten 
the ignorant and enrich our literature. 

221 



GNADENSEE 

It was a pleasant ramble through the pastures 
and wild junipers down to the "confluence of the 
streams." This was the Pishgachtigok, the Scha- 
ticoke or Scatacook of the Indians. Here, where 
the rivers foamed and roared in rocky eddies and 
cataracts, the Indian fisherman often came with his 
spear. As we stood there the forest shut out all 
traces of civilization. It was a symphony of wa- 
ters, a place for imagination and dreams. But 
there are other dreams. The engineers who throw 
bridges across East River on the point of a lead 
pencil, are planning to build a dam at South Dover, 
which shall flood the valley back to Wassaic. Let 
those who would see Pishgachtigok visit it soon. 



222 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 



"The place which the wisdom or policy of antiquity had 
destined for the residence of the Abyssinian princes, was 
a spacious valley in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded 
on every side by mountains. . . . From the mountains, riv- 
ulets descended that filled all the valley with verdure and 
fertility. . . . The sides of the mountains were covered 
with trees, the banks of the brooks were diversified with 
flowers ; every blast shook spices from the rocks, and every 
month dropped fruits upon the ground. . . . Here the sons 
and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft 
vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all tViat 
were skilfulto delight, and gratified with whatever the 
senses can enjoy. . . . To heighten their opinion of their 
own felicity, they were daily entertained with songs, the 
subject of which was the happy valley." — Rasselas. 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 



The outlets of Gnadensee and Lake Webotuck 
join their waters in a strong, swift stream, flowing 
through the meadows of Sharon Valley until they 
empty into the Ten Mile River, or Webotuck, as 
the Indians called it. There seems to be some dif- 
ference of opinion about the etymology of this 
word. Trumbull says it is the same as Weep- 
atuck, which means the place at the narrow pass. 
Isaac Huntting of Pine Plains, New York, a care- 
ful student of Indian antiquities, insists that it 
comes from two words, Wccpe meaning a tooth and 
ing, a terminal signifying place of, hence the place 
of tooth mouniain, the tooth or "Peaked Mountain" 
being a marked feature of the country to the south 
of Sharon. Mr. Myron B. Benton of Leedsville, 
through whose beautiful farm at Troutbeck the 
Webotuck flews, says he once asked Eunice 
Mahwe, a well-known Indian woman of the Scata- 
225 



GNADENSEE 

cook tribe, what the word meant and was told, 
"beautiful or pleasant hunting-grounds." 

Whatever the etymology of the word may be, 
the Valley of the Webotuck is one of the fairest, 
greenest and most picturesque that can be found 
in long traveling; it is now a dairy country, with a 
reputation for milk and cream which the meadows 
of Holland and the pastures of Switzerland cannot 
surpass. To climb the mountains on either side 
and look down is to have a vision which will abide. 
Of course it is not the Vale of Cashmere or the 
"Happy Valley" of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 
described in Dr. Johnson's famous classic, but this 
border country of New York and Connecticut 
should satisfy any moderate lover of the beautiful. 
Mountains shrouded in legend and tradition frame 
it in. Bright streams weave their silver braids into 
green meadows, trout brooks come leaping and 
foaming down to join them. The farmhouses are 
set in groves of elm and maple. Apple orchards 
everywhere give the landscape a color and a fra- 
grance beyond the hawthorns of England. On all 
the country roads are milk wagons drawn by the 
spans of the farmers. It is a land flowing with 
milk, yes, we may add, and honey, too. One not 
acquainted with the narrow margin of profit in 
226 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 

farming would fain dwell here, wrapped in Elysian 
illusions. For lovers, it is a Sesenheim with many 
a charming idyl, such as Goethe found in his stu- 
dent days among the "blue Alsatian mountains." 
The few Palatinate exiles, who settled in the valley 
and at Amenia Union, must have been reminded 
of the scenery around Heidelberg and the wooded 
hills of the Neckar. 

Oblong Mountain, a long dark height rising sym- 
metrically above the Amenia farms, stands like the 
abutment of a bridge, to break and part the cur- 
rent. Imagination sees it emerge from geologic 
waters, which flowed around its base and poured 
down the valley. It must have been an island then, 
separating the waters from the waters. 

At Wassaic the great hills are massed. It seems 
as though the Commander of nature's forces had 
set his standard here and said, "Close up in serried 
ranks." 

From the source of the Webotuck to its junction 
with the Housatonic, the valley extends for up- 
wards of thirty miles. The "Ten Miles River" of 
the early settlers is therefore a misnomer. 

The river terraces were the corn-lands of the In- 
dians and maize is still the crop which they pro- 
duce in abundance. Here were the scattered wig- 
227 



GNADENSEE 

warns and villages, as Indian relics show. The 
Indian trail to the Housatonic was the present 
route by way of "Bog Hollow," a much more pic- 
turesque pass than its name implies. 

Let us imagine ourselves in the valley during 
the stone age of Indian occupation. The river 
terraces are treeless, but skirted by groves of gi- 
gantic sycamores, white oaks, ash and tulip trees. 
These sycamores still stand like sentinels along the 
river. They are the descendants of former lordly 
trees, the Platanus occidentalis, button-ball or water- 
beech. 

The river then was a much larger stream than 
now. Its waters teemed with fish. There were 
the beaver, the otter, the mink and the muskrat for 
fur. The red deer ran in droves over the moun- 
tains. No wonder the Indians thought their valley 
a foretaste of the Happy Hunting Grounds ! 

The Webotuck Valley might be called the valley 
of exile and rest. Here came the Winegars from 
Germantown, in 1724, a worthy Palatinate family. 
The invasion of the German Palatinates on the 
Rhine by the French in 1707 was the direct cause 
of the Palatine emigration, as it enforced the Revo- 
cation of the Edict of Nantes. There is a peculiar 
satisfaction that Palatinate exiles, who had experi- 
228 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 

enced a double sorrow in their banishment from 
the German fatherland and the exactions of royal 
commissioners in the new world, should at last 
find rest and happiness in this beautiful valley. To 
them, as to uf, it was Amenia, the pleasant, the 
friendly. 

There were Huguenots, too, the Delamaters, rep- 
resenting the utmost reach of that most terrible of 
all expulsions, which deprived France of nearly a 
million of her best subjects — a loss from which the 
Republic still reels. A brick house, built by John 
Delamater in 1761, is yet standing at Leedsville. 
The initials "J- ^- D." can be seen on the wall. 
They stand for John and Mary Delamater. One 
thinks of other inscriptions which the Huguenots 
of La Rochelle cut into their houses : 

En attendant une meilltire. 
"While waiting for a better." 

Vaincre le mal en bien faisant 
Est a noire Dicu fort plaisant. 
"To overcome evil with good 
Is to our God well pleasing." 

This little vine-covered Huguenot home on the 
Webotuck is more than a landmark; it is an epic 
of faith. 

Here came also the Knickerbockers and Van 
229 



GNADENSEE 

Dusens, sturdy Dutch colonists, pushing in from 
the Hudson. 

There has been a growing interest in this 
old Dutch stock ever since Washington Irving 
turned upon them the light of his genial genius. 
We see them eating their rolliches of an evening, 
smoking then* pipes in the chimney corner and 
waddling their way to some little Gcreformeerde 
Kerche along the Tappan Zee. It is the same 
dauntless race that raised the siege of Leyden, drew 
the fangs of the Inquisition and by the exploits of 
De Wet and the statesmanship of Roosevelt is win- 
ning the praise of the world. 

English Puritans, another race, if possible even 
stronger and more influential, were pushing out 
from the Connecticut in hope of getting better 
lands. In this valley they settled. 

Turn now from the colonists to nature. 

At the southern end of the valley, near Dover 
Plains, are two natural wonders, which would sat- 
isfy even Gilbert White's demand for a suitable age 
in what we designate as our antiquities, since they 
go back of all written history and antedate the 
creation of man. They are the Old Stone Church 
and the Dover Wells. Wells and grottoes! these 
abound at Dover. 

230 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 

As the tourist follows one of the streams which 
flow down from the western ridge, he comes to a 
rocky wall which not only bars the way but forms 
a grotto that is perfect and unique. No human 
sculptor has carved a figure into the steep rock, 
but the wild torrent has by erosion eaten out an 
entrance. It is called the Old Stone Church, since 
the triangular opening and spacious antrum within 
resemble a place of worship. The water drips 
down from the moist wet sides, but pours into the 
cave from the rear. There is the sound of many 
waters. On the roof ferns and trees arc growing. 
The chasm above and back of the church has walls 
which are fifty feet in height. Cascades leap down 
the rocks and through the hemlocks the sunbeams 
struggle. 

Not far from the "Church" are the "Wells," an- 
other natural wonder. Whirlpools of water, boil- 
ing and churning round the rock for ages, have 
formed deep wells, whose sides are polished as if 
by the lapidary's skill. There is a series of these 
wells. Some are so deep that one would fain be 
lowered into them to see the stars at noon. 

On asking the way to the Wells, we were told 
to take the railroad track half a mile south from 
the station, turn west by an old barn and then 
231 



GNADENSEE 

follow the roar. That is right. Below the Wells 
the stream purls, above them it babbles, but at the 
Wells it roars. 

The poets are usually very accurate in their al- 
lusions to nature. In the 'Tn Memoriam," Tenny- 
son speaks of "the roaring wells." Though the ex- 
pression there refers to the fountains of the sea, 
one thinks of it here at Dover. 

In the Isle of Wight this chasm of the Wells 
would be called a chine, in the West a canon, but 
we must adhere to such terms as defile, ravine or 
gorge. Often the water pours mysteriously into 
a well as though some mighty faucet of nature had 
been turned on, to rebuke the parsimony of our 
water companies. 

The fierce commercialism of American life does 
not take kindly to poetry. A scientific age, with 
railroad whistles and electric dynamos, frightens 
Apollo and the muses. And yet, in the telephone 
wires can still be heard that old music of the spheres 
which charmed the soul of Pythagoras. There are 
still those who, like the shy scholar in Gray's 
Elegy, "pore upon the brook that babbles by." 
Should this book ever fall into their hands they 
will, perhaps, wander down the valley and in some 
sylvan nook of the Dover streams on a summer's 
dav, read the cantos of "The Faerie Queene." 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 

Do you ask for direction? Leave the village and 
the track, turn in by an old barn and follozv the 
roar. 

It is vision that our age needs and melody. 
Science and induction abound, but the scientific 
habit atrophies the instinct for poetry and reduces 
music to a computation of the calculus. Where 
there is no vision the people perish. The early 
Christians did not feed their souls on ethics, but 
saw on earth the descending glories of the city of 
God. 

A Swiss chalet is poetic in exterior only. The 
peasant within lives amid bovine smells. He loves 
the Ranz dcs Vachcs, but is deaf to the Bcrglicd. 
Tyndall found in the Alps only force and energy, 
but to Byron and Coleridge they were the halls 
and hymns of deity. The Beatific Vision of medi- 
eval theology is not a superstition but a faith. 
That we might wonder and adore, two of the evan- 
gelists wrought into their gospel the story of the 
virgin birth. The Infant of days must be eternal in 
the heavens. 

Life is not discovery, but recovery — a recovery of 
ideals. We need to walk the corridors of time, en- 
ter the aisles of old cathedrals, pause at font and 
altar until we are anointed with holy chrism and 
feel the imposition of irresistible hands. 



GNADENSEE 

Nature has her cathedrals, too, her churches of 
stone and wells of inspiration. No sacristan de- 
mands a fee. You wear the crown and ephod — for 
you the laurel and the sounding stars. 

Let us come now to a part of the valley whose 
history lies within the memory of living men. In 
the hamlet known as Sharon Valley, stands an 
old dilapidated building. No one would ever think 
of it as famous or historic. It is only a barn and 
place of storage at present, but on looking about 
the visitor will find pulleys and traces of machin- 
ery; shafts and ruined wheels have tumbled into 
the stream which once supplied the power for 
manufacturing. That little dilapidated building 
could unfold a tale about guns and projectiles 
which is of national and world-wide importance. 
Here thought and toiled the members of a family 
who were destined to set the name of Hotchkiss 
beside that of Colt, Maxim and other great Ameri- 
cans who have led the world in the manufacture 
of weapons and missiles of destruction. 

When the allied French and English armies were 
laying siege to the impregnable fortresses of the 
Crimea, Andrew Hotchkiss, the cripple of Sharon 
Valley, was saying, "I will invent a shell that will 
take Sebastapol." He died in 1858, but his ideas 
234 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 

were carried out by his brother, Benjamin Berkley 
Hotchkiss, some years later. 

Huxley has a noted lecture on "A Piece of 
Chalk." One more startling, if not so interesting, 
might be given on a piece of shell preserved in 
Sharon. It is the last shell turned out at this old 
shop' in 1863, The works were later moved to 
Bridgeport and New York, the demand being too 
great for the home factory. This shell is a three- 
inch percussion. Shells were made here by A. A. 
Hotchkiss and Sons, for the government, from 2.6 
inches to 7.5 inches in diameter. There were per- 
cussion shells, fuse shells and bullet shells. Their 
manufacture was not a business project merely, 
but a patriotism and a passion. Money is the 
sinews of war, but many a poor fellow found his 
sinews gone who led a dauntless charge under 
Stonewall Jackson and Pickett, for the story of a 
Hotchkiss shell is not the story of a government 
contract or a museum relic — it is a ghastly tale of 
suffering and death. 

The member of the family destined to win last- 



' There were two shops — the one on the other side of 
the street and farther south was known as the Malleable 
Shop. Here castings were made and the heavier work 
done, but it was at the little old shop on the stream that 
the shells were finished. 

235 



GNADENSEE 

iiig fame was Benjamin Berkley Hotchkiss. He 
was one of the foremost artillerists of his day and 
the inventor of important improvements in ord- 
nance and the science of gunnery. It was after the 
Civil War, when in France, that his famous revolv- 
ing cannon was taken up by the French govern- 
ment and soon used by the principal countries of 
Europe and South America. This is one of the 
greatest inventions of our age and cannot become 
antiquated. It has been used on land and sea. 

In 1882 the firm of Hotchkiss and Company was 
formed, with headcjuarters in the United States and 
branch establishments in England, Germany, Aus- 
tria, Russia and Italy. Mr. Hotchkiss died in 
Paris, in 1885, while making further improvements 
on his revolving cannon, but not until a fortune 
of millions had been accumulated, the proceeds 
of which have helped many worthy charities. His 
widow, Mrs. Maria H. Hotchkiss, founded and en- 
dowed the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville and the 
Memorial Library in Sharon. 

What is that little old shop in Sharon Valley — a 
ruin in wood and stone, a part of some real es- 
tate sale? Men think so, but its ideas fought the 
battles of Koniggratz and Gettysburg, of Manila 
Bay and Santiago. 

236 



THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY 

West of Gnadensee the Webotuck flows through 
fertile meadows. The pastoral landscape contracts 
into a glen where the wind in the firs and 
the babble of the river blend in music. Did 
the road, which runs to the railway station from 
Sharon Valley, but follow the stream to Coleman's, 
Sharon village would have an ideal approach. For 
a cut of convenience man misses the vision of 
beauty ; for a road of cinders he sells the vale en- 
chanted. The loiterer knows the waterway and the 
fisherman; the farmers have kindly spared some of 
the firs. The name, Wequadnach Glen, is given in 
the hope that, in the future, many may visit it. It 
borders the beautiful estate of Hiddenhurst and is 
an easy walk from the village. 



237 



THE LOST BROOK AND THE FOUN- 
TAIN OF YOUTH 



"Arethusa arose 

From her couch of snows 
In the Acroceraunian mountains 

From cloud and from crag 

With many a jag, 
Shepherding her bright fountains. 

She leapt down the rocks 

With her rainbow locks 
Streaming among the streams : 

Her steps paved with green 

The downward ravine 
Which slopes to the western gleams. 

"Then Alpheus bold, 

On his glacier cold. 
With his trident the mountains strook ; 

And opened a chasm 

In the rocks ; — with the spasm 
All Erymanthus shook." 

— Shelley. 



THE LOST BROOK AND THE FOUNTAIN 
OF YOUTH 



The Webotuck River rises in a spring of the Riga 
Pass, where the mountain walls are very steep and 
the valley narrowed and contracted. It was in Oc- 
tober, that ideal weather for walking, just six 
months after we had followed the river to its out- 
let below the Reservation, that we went north, in 
search of its spring and that Lost Brook of which 
we had often heard. Along the roadside Fringed 
Gentian, the Gcntiana crinata of the botanists, was 
blooming under the "cerulean wall" and the exhib- 
itors of nature's tapestry had thrown their samples 
across the mountains, carpets of russet and brown, 
with crimson and scarlet figures. 

It has been said that the American air is like 
champagne. October in the Riga Pass is the time 
to think of the champagne country. 



241 



GNADENSEE 

Pleasant now to live together 
'Neath the roof of such a weather 
Where sun-burnt maids in laughter call 
O'er some rich vintage Provencal, 
And purple headlands hold in fee 
The tuneful, hoary, classic sea. 

The first white men who ever came to this Pass, 
so far as we have any record, were the Massachu- 
setts and Connecticut Indian Commissioners, in 
August, 1694. They had conchided a treaty at Al- 
bany with the chiefs of the Five Nations and were 
now on their way home, escorted by Captain Wads- 
worth of Hartford, at the head of sixty dragoons. 
One of the company was the Rev. Benjamin Wads- 
worth, afterward president of Harvard College. 
They had been floundering through the swamps, 
were saddle-sore, and evidently the young doctor 
of theology was in no mood to appreciate the scen- 
ery, for at this spot he wrote in his unique journal, 
on our left, a hideous mountain. He also mentions a 
"Ten Miles river, by ye side of which we rode." 
This is a most valuable statement, without which 
we should never have known the origin of that 
title. The Indians called the river Webotuck and 
the Dutch, Mink-in-Kill. 

To go back a little : from the Mount Riga station 
a walk of a mile and a half on the railroad track 
242 



LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH 

brings the tourist to a gradient which, according 
to the railroad survey, is the highest point between 
New York and Chatham. You can see where the 
road-bed rises and falls away. This is the water- 
shed. On one side the drops fall into the Webo- 
tuck and find their way to the Housatonic, on the 
other they fall into the Roloef Jansen Kill, that 
watercourse mentioned so often in the old bound- 
aries, and reach the Hudson. Near this divide, in 
a farmer's field, a little east of the highway, is the 
Webotuck Spring. We found it bubbling under 
the roots of a spreading ash, at the foot of a rocky 
knoll. It isi a most beautiful and fascinating spot. 
You cannot see into the sanctities of the grotto ; 
the trout hide there always and only know it, but 
you can push a pole far in, showing the extent of 
the spring. We drank of this sparkling pool, at 
the head of that river we had now followed from 
source to outlet. Here was what Ponce de Leon 
vainly sought in the woods of Florida, the Foun- 
tain of Youth. Around the spring were oaks and 
noble trees, forming the kind of a place Euterpe 
and the Muses would have delighted to linger in. 
A governor of Connecticut once came here to drink 
of the water, and were the spring not so remote 
and better known it would have many visitors. 
243 



GNADENSEE 

Under the grand and precipitous mountains, which 
rise above the fertile valley, it has bubbled forth, a 
font of immemorial time, a fountain of Hygeia. 

But where was the Lost Brook? About a gun- 
shot away we found it. A stream comes foaming 
and tumbling down the mountain in a series of cas- 
cades, then drops into the ground and is seen no 
more. It has always done so. There is no deep 
cavern or hole, but a drop and a disappearance. 
The question arises, "Is not the Webotuck Spring 
the Lost Brook, reappearing after its journey un- 
derground?" Hardly. Sometimes in summer the 
brook runs dry, but the spring is as full as ever. 
Yet there must be some connection, for once when 
men prospecting for iron roiled the water in the 
brook the spring was also afifected. 

As one lingers here by the Lost Brook and the 
Webotuck Spring he inevitably thinks of Arethusa, 
that matchless and mysterious fountain in Sicily. 
According to the Greek legend, Arethusa was a 
beautiful nymph living in the Acroceraunian moun- 
tains and chased by Alpheus, the river god, who 
was enamored of her beauty. In her extremity 
and fear the nymph sent up a piteous cry to Arte- 
mis, then sank beneath the stream where it disap- 
pears in a rocky chasm. The goddess, who had 
244 



LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH 

guided her under the sea, brought her back to the 
light of day at this fountain near Syracuse. It was 
beHeved that the river Alpheus, which disappeared, 
ran under the sea and came up here. As one looks 
up at the shaggy height where the Lost Brook 
comes tumbling down to disappear and perhaps 
emerge again in the Webotuck Spring, it is not 
difficult to imagine a beautiful Indian girl pursued 
down the mountain by a too impetuous lover, and 
then hiding from sight in one of these underground 
caves. 

The road past the Webotuck Spring and the 
Lost Brook runs northward to Boston Corners. 
This place is a division of the earth's surface about 
which geography gives scant information and 
where history moves cautiously. 

At present Boston Corners is as temperate, or- 
derly and righteous a place as any country hamlet 
can be, but the one who would tell of it as it was, 
must relate the story of the Clan Lawless. The 
line between New York and Connecticut being 
much in dispute, an agreement was made in 1731, 
by which a strip one and three-quarters miles in 
width was ceded to New York, known as "The 
Oblong." This has been already referred to. The 
new division left Massachusetts projecting beyond 
245 



GNADENSEE 

Connecticut with a sharp corner, which was sepa- 
rated from the rest of the state by an impassable 
mountain. As it was supposed to be ruled from 
Boston it was dubbed Boston Corners, but it was 
a lawless and unmanageable corner. The sover- 
eignty and inaccessibility made the trouble. All 
sorts of lawless people came here. The Massa- 
chusetts sheriffs could not get over the mountains 
to arrest the lawbreakers ; the New York authori- 
ties had no rights on Massachusetts territory. A 
duel was fought by parties from New York City, 
in which one of the principals was wounded. Then 
came the prize-fight between"Yankee" Sullivan and 
John Morissey. Morissey afterwards went to Con- 
gress and the local wits said he began his congres- 
sional career at Boston Corners, by "practicing on 
the ayes and noes." Things became so bad that, 
finally, New York petitioned to have Massachu- 
setts' unmanageable corner set olT to her, which was 
done. This ended the reign of lawlessness. 

All modern maps have cut ofif this triangular 
section and lawless corner. 

From the highway at Boston Corners, just over 
the line that separates Duchess and Columbia 
counties, a path leads up the mountain. 

Few of the sojourners and residents around The 
246 



LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH 

Lake of Grace are aware that just to the north of 
them is one of the wildest, grandest tracts in 
southern New England. Small need to go to the 
Adirondacks, when they lie at your very door. 
Thus far, though, the colliers have had them pretty 
much to themselves. Every summer there are 
young men in knickerbockers who long for some- 
thing to do. What can be done when young Her- 
cules and Adonis tire of golf, femininity and this 
endless sitting around. By the man's soul in him 
let him climb. Driving is expensive ; mountain 
walls cannot be scaled by automobiles. There is 
only one elevator ; the legs must push the body up. 
But where is it safe and practicable to go? There 
are no guides at the hotels. Thank heaven they 
are not needed. In one brief day a climb and a 
tramp can be taken, whose ozone will redden the 
corpuscles in the blood, whose memory will reach 
even into life's decline. 

Taking the path at Boston Corners, in less than 
an hour young Knickerbocker will be on the 
mountain, if he does not punctuate the climb too 
often by repeating Longfellow's "Excelsior." In 
the zigzag path sliding heels have grained and pol- 
ished the old Silurian rocks. Up and out on the 
rocky height young Hercules will walk into the 
247 



GNADENSEE 

upper air on this wind-swept ridge-pole of New 
York and Connecticut. Just in front is a mountain 
with a cairn of stones, which every one has noticed 
from the car window. 'Tis Monument Mountain, 
and to the north is another, with the same name, ly- 
ing between Great Harrington and Stockbridge, 
which Bryant has sung into lasting fame. Dwarf 
blueberries and black huckleberries grow abun- 
dantly on Monument Mountain, even as late as 
October. How the mountains are tumbled! Three 
states have put their offerings into a contribution- 
box and fastened it securely over Boston Corners. 
Alandar, Race, The Dome, Poconnuck and Canaan 
Mountain have all been, thrown in, with Greylock, 
or Saddleback, to the north. The humps or pom- 
mels of the saddle can be plainly seen. To the 
south the high wall rises from the Webotuck valley, 
wrinkled and folded like a dragon, and there, flash- 
ing in silver beauty, is little Gnadensee, laying its 
sleeping head upon the dragon's awful tail. But 
what can Hercules and Adonis do up here? Sepa- 
rated from Monument Mountain by a wooded val- 
ley is another alluring peak. They are like Ebal 
and Gerizim and one can hallo across from the sum- 
mit in New York to the other in Massachusetts. 
The wireless telegraphy is the resonant air. Then 
248 



LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH 

at the flash of a kodak, as a signal agreed upon, 
Hercules and Adonis can descend together. If 
there is a little rivalry as to who shall reach 
the valley first, there will be headers into the 
bushes, torn clothes, scratches and bruised shins. 
Adonis descends with dignity, but Hercules is a 
plunger. 

In the old wood road in the valley is a new stone 
boundary, marked New York on the west side, 
Massachusetts on the east, and 1898 on the north 
side. Following the path cut out by the surveyors 
through the bushes about four hundred feet is an- 
other stone exactly like it, standing beside the old 
limestone marker. The latter is lettered New 
York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. One won- 
ders why Connecticut is not also cut into one of 
the new granite shafts, but the legislature did not 
cooperate. If young Hercules has the wisdom of 
Minerva he will descend to Boston Corners as the 
sunset begins to gild the Catskills in the west. In 
his wisdom he took a pocket compass and marked 
the spot where the path leaves the mountain. Above 
all he did not tarry to get caught in a mist. In 
the boarding-houses and on hotel piazzas young 
Knickerbocker can now discourse to the unini- 
tiated on Hercules in Wonderland. 
249 



GNADENSEE 

There is a geography not down in the atlas. The 
Fountain of Youth bubbles in the Riga Pass and 
there is a way up the steep. 

That "Blue Flower," which, according to Nova- 
lis, is the vision of our dreams, the completion of 
our happiness and the pledge of our immortality, 
blooms here. 



250 



TROUTBECK 



"Ye sacred Muses ! witli whose beauty fired 
My soul is ravished and my brain inspired — 
Whose priest I am, whose holy fillets wear — 
Would you your poet's first petition hear; 
Give me the ways of wandering stars to know, 
The depth of heav'n above, and earth below : 
Teach me the various labors of the moon. 
And whence proceed the eclipses of the sun. 

***♦*♦♦ 
"My next desire is, void of care and strife, 
To lead a soft, secure, inglorious life — 
A country cottage near a crystal flood, 
A winding valley, and a lofty wood." 

— "Georgic II," Virgil. 



TROUTBECK 



Where the Webotuck flows softly through green 
meadows, the valley road follows the trees and 
vines, crosses a bridge (here the river is loudly 
musical) and by an avenue of sycamores leads up 
to Troutbeck. The brown and gray of the build- 
ings, the hayricks in the fields, the stones and 
fences by the roadside, all blend into the landscape. 
Over everything is a spirit of rest, a dreamy mist 
of meadow, save that at times the wind blows 
fiercely through Bellows Gap, that pass and en- 
trance to Troutbeck from the west. 

At the summit of a long, wooded ridge Wardwell 
Peak looks down on the valley and the farm. 

In the rear of the house is a spring where the 
trout run up from the river and stay. You can al- 
ways see them^ — they dart and flash in the hot sum- 
mer days. This spring, with its little stream of 
pure, cold water, gave the name of Troutbeck to 
the farm. 

253 



GNADENSEE 

It is very evident that some one has lived here 
who loved the spot. The landscape has responded 
to human touch, every view point been guarded, 
trees have been spared, each vine coiled by an ar- 
tist's hand and flowers and bulbs set in beds that 
smile on the lawn or from the window. 

As you enter the house the etching of an old 
cathedral meets the eye, Indian relics gathered on 
the farm, autographs and souvenirs, but chiefly 
books, books on literature, forestry and history, 
rare books, quaint books, good books — books that 
have been patted as friends and loved for the souls 
in them. An unworldly person loves bulbs and 
books always. 

It is hard to tell what some men were meant to 
be. The owner of Troutbeck might have been an 
artist, a landscape-gardener, a literary critic or a 
philosopher (he could not have been a politician). 
Essentially he was a poet, and had he made poetry 
the business and not the incident of his life, hd 
would have ranked with those who wear the laurel. 
As it is he has left a name in literature, and the 
material for a choice volume should it ever be com- 
piled. 

He contributed to The Dial, edited by Moncure 
D. Conway, The Boston Commonwealth. The In- 
254 



TROUTBECK 

dependent, and The Radical. His articles in local 
journals, on the artistic side of farm life, the preser- 
vation of beauty for utility and profit, papers read 
before literary clubs on the antiquities of the re- 
gion around Troutbeck, were always events looked 
forward to and talked about. He was an authority 
on natural history, like Gilbert White of old Sel- 
borne — one of his favorite authors. * 

Here was a man who had read every word Tho- 
reau ever wrote and who was one of the finest Cole- 
ridge scholars in the country. Thoreau's last let- 
ter, printed in his published letters, is addressed 
to Mr. Benton, and among the autographs, which 
he had spent a lifetime in collecting, f? a letter of 
Coleridge's — a literary treasure now priceless. Who 
would think that the great philosopher and subtle 
poet of the Lake School would ever drop a leaf of 
his genius here at Troutbeck ; that one could turn 
in from cans and cows to Coleridge? 

In The Atlantic Monthly for July, 1894, is an 
article signed by Myron B. Benton on "Coleridge's 
Introduction to the Lake District." The men who 
can get an article into the Atlantic, that aristocrat 
of literary taste, that blue blood of Shawmut, have 
always been few, yet this article by the shy scholar 
of Troutbeck docs not falter or apologize. It is 
255 



GNADENSEE 

the work of a man who is sure of his ground, as 
sure as though he were a dalesman himself and 
had heard the gusts blow on Skiddavv, and yet he 
never crossed the ocean. It is based on the auto- 
graph letter and is a fine specimen of literary dis- 
crimination. There is a temptation to quote the 
chaste sentences, telling how Wordsworth and 
Coleridge roamed over the breezy hills that look 
out on the Bristol Channel, with that rare spirit of 
appreciation, Dorothy Wordsworth, ever near, and 
later among the Langdale Pikes heard echoes 
charm 

"With ropes of rock and bells of air." 

It was an acquaintance and friendship that aug- 
ured much for poetry. "Coleridge's being burst into 
unwonted radiance and splendor — not alas ! to en- 
dure, so far as poetical achievement was concerned." 
"A lambent flame suffused the spirit of Words- 
worth," but we turn from Mr. Benton's sentences 
and analysis to the letter itself. Coleridge is set- 
tled in his new home among the peaks and lakes 
of Cumberland. The words of "the inspired charity 
boy of Christ's Hospital" and whom in early man- 
hood the host of the Salutation and Cat offered 
free entertainment "only to come and talk" are al- 
256 



TROUTBECK 

ways genius-smitten. We quote the beginning and 
end of this letter, which is a sacred reHc at Trout- 
beck: 

"Friday, July 25, 1800. 

"From the leads on the housetop of Greta Hall, Kes- 
wick, Cumberland, at the present time in the occupancy 
and usufruct-possession of S. T. Coleridge, Esq., Gentle- 
man-poet and Philosopher in a mist. 

"Yes, my dear Tobin, here I am, with Skiddaw behind 
my back; the Lake of Bassenthwaite, with its simple and 
majestic case of mountains, on my right; on my left, and 
stretching far away into the fantastic mountains of Bor- 
rowdale, the Lake of Derwentwater; straight before me a 
whole camp of giants' tents, — or is it an ocean rushing in, 
in billows that, even in the serene sky, reach halfway to 
heaven? When I look at the feathery top of this scoun- 
drel pen, with which I am making desperate attempts to 
write, I see (in that slant direction) the sun almost set- 
ting, — in ten minutes it will touch the top of the crag; the 
vale of Keswick lies between us. . . . 

"I left Wordsworth yesterday ; he was tolerably well, 
and meditates more than his side permits him even to at- 
tempt. He has a bed for you ; but I absolutely stipulate 
that you shall be half the time at Keswick. . . . 

"Wordsworth remains at Grasmere till next summer 
(perhaps longer). His cottage is indeed in every respect 
so delightful a residence, the walks so dry after the long- 
est rains, the heath and a silky kind of fern so luxurious a 
bedding on every hilltop, and the whole vicinity so tossed 
about on those little hills at the feet of the majestic moun- 
tains, that he moves in an eddy; he cannot get out of it. 

"In the way of books, we are extraordinarily well oS 
for a country place. My landlord has a respectable library, 
full of dictionaries and useful modern things; ex. gr., the 
Scotch Encyclopaedia, the authors of which may the devil 

257 , 



GNADENSEE 

scotch, for toothless serpents that poison with dribble! . . . 

"Hartly retains his love to you; he talks often about 
you. I hear his voice at this moment distinctly; he is be- 
low in the garden, shouting to some foxgloves and fern, 
which he has transplanted, and telling them what he will 
do for them if they grow like good boys ! This afternoon 
I sent him naked into a shallow of the river Greta; he 
trembled with the novelty, yet you cannot conceive his rap- 
tures. 

"God bless you ! 

"I remain, with affectionate esteem, 
"Yours sincerely, 

"S. T. Coleridge. 

"1 open the letter, and make a new fold, to tell you that 
I have bit the wafer into the very shape of the young moon 
that is just above the opposite hill." 

The mind of some men is an orderly series of 
mathemathical calculations ; the mind of others is 
a stream of music. The second is the poetic tem- 
perament. Coleridge had it and the Coleridge 
scholar of Troutbeck. It is the sound of many 
waters murmuring as they do here ; it is like the 
tuHp tree, a native also at Troutbeck, whose very 
name — liriodendron tulipifera — is a musical chord. 

Like the author of the Georgics, the laird of 
Troutbeck loved the life of the farm. He would 
be enrolled in the census as a farmer and considered 
himself honored by the name. He says, "We have 
hugged the soil close — an unbroken line of farm- 
ers: how far back in England, green and old, I do 
258 , ^ 



TROUTBECK 

not know, but doubtless a long- way. This bucolic 
association has permeated the very blood; I feel it 
in every heart-beat. My intense local attachment 
I doubt not has been fostered through many gen- 
erations." 

Too modest to claim other distinction, and prob- 
ably not desiring it, his friend and occasional visi- 
tor at Troutbeck, John Burroughs, wrote thus of 
him a few years ago, in the Twentieth Century Re- 
view: 

"Planter of trees and vines, preserver of old picturesque 
cottages, lover of paths and streams, beautifier of highways, 
friend of all wild and shy things, historian and portrayor 
of big trees, collector of local relics, and seeker and culti- 
vator of all that gives flavor and character to a place, he 
is the practical poet of whom the country everywhere needs 
many more." 

He might be called a botanist in love. He fell on 
his knees before the Orchis of our northern woods 
and then sang about it. He knew where the delicate 
Dicentra could be found and the elusive inhabitants 
of wood and swamp. He could not be a sportsman, 
for, like Saint Francis of Assisi, he tamed and loved 
wild natures. 

A literary circle, of which Troutbeck was the 
center, included John Burroughs, Moncure D. Con- 
259 



GNADENSEE 

way, R. H. Stoddard, Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard and 
Joel Benton. 

Three Troutbeck poems have made a permanent 
place in literature. The first is 'The Mowers," in 
Bryant's anthology. Ever since Ovid wrote in the 
Metamorphoses about the 

"dura ilia messorum," 
those hard thighs of the reapers, the men of the 
scythe and sickle, have been cutting a swath in lit- 
erature. Mr. Benton has caught the swing exactly 
and found a meter for it, which he probably in- 
vented. You hear the ting-a-ling of the whetstone, 
see the mowers in the meadow, each just ahead of 
the other, all bending to their work and moving 
forward together. It is one of the few perfect 
poems on labor. No man could have written it 
who had not lived in the country and worked in a 
hay-field, though swinging a scythe usually raises a 
bUster instead of a poem. We can only quote a 
fragment here, unfortunately: 

"The sun-burnt mowers are in the swath — 

Swing, swing, swing! 
The towering lilies loath 
Tremble and totter and fall ; 
The meadow-rue 

Dashes its tassels of golden dew; 
And the keen blade sweeps o'er all — 

Swing, swing, swing! 
260 



TROUTBECK 

"July is just in the nick of time ! 

( Hay-weather, hay-weather ; ) 
The mid-summer month is the golden prime 
For haycocks smelling of clover and thyme 

(Swing all together!) 
July is just in the nick of time!" 

The second poem in "Songs of Nature," edited 
by John Burroughs, is a "Midsummer Invitation." 
It begins, 

"O pallid student ! leave thy dim alcove 

And stretch one restful summer afternoon, 

Thoughtless amidst the thoughtless things of June, 

Beneath these boughs with light and murmur wove. 

Drop book and pen, a thrall released rove; 

The Sisyphean task flung off, impugn 

The withered Sphynx — with earth's fresh heart attune." 

Impugn the Sphynx is good — it sticks in the mem- 
ory. The last, "There is One Spot for which My 
Soul Will Yearn," published in the same collection, 
was read at the poet's funeral and makes Troutbeck 
now a spot haunted, by its genius loci: 

"There is one spot for which my soul will yearn, 

May it but come where breeze and sunlight play 
And leaves are glad, some path of swift return; 

A waif — a presence borne on friendly ray — 
Even thus, if but beneath the same blue sky ! 

The grazing kine not then will see me cross 
The pasture slope; the swallows will not shy, 

Nor brooding thrush : blithe bees the floweds will toss. 
261 



GNADENSEE 

Not the faint thistle down my breath may charm. 

Ah, me! But I shall find the dear ways old. 
If I have leave, that sheltered valley farm; 

Its climbing woods, its spring, the meadow's gold; 
The creek-path dearest to my boyhood's feet — 
O God ! is there another world so sweet?" 

Whether the fond wish be granted or denied, those 
who knew him will ever say, "This gentle spirit 
had no enemies; the law of kindness was in his 
heart and he kept the faith of things immortal." It 
pleases us best to think of him as at Troutbeck 
still. 1 



262 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 



"Pathfinder!" 

"So they call me, and many a great lord has got a title 
that he did not half so well merit; though, if truth be said, 
I rather pride myself in finding my way where there is no 
path than in finding it where there is. But the regular 
troops are by no means particular, and half the time they 
do n't know the difiference between a trail and a path, 
though one is a matter for the eye, while the other is little 
more than a scent." — "The Pathfinder," Leather Stocking 
Tales. 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 



Trail is an American word and belongs to the 
new world exclusively. There is something of the 
hunter and the woodsman left in all of us. The 
culture of Harvard did not obliterate it in Roose- 
velt and the world is glad of it. 

As one rides on the Harlem train north from the 
Lake of Grace he sees on the right a continuous 
mountain wall which challenges the climber to 
scale it. Ravines have seamed it in places, down 
which the cascades come leaping and foaming af- 
ter the heavy rains of summer. This wall is the 
natural rampart and bulwark of New England. 
Here the Berkshires end. Along this high roof 
are the triangulation stations of the United States 
Geodetic Survey. At Copake Iron Works there is 
a break in the wall. Through a wild and lonely 
gorge the Bash Bish stream comes down from 
Alandar. After a series of cascades and water- 
265 



GNADENSEE 

falls it takes a sheer plunge of sixty feet over the 
wet and slippery rocks to fall into a deep emerald 
pool below. These falls are 'The Staubbach" of 
Berkshire. Dark spruces clinging to the splin- 
tered crags almost catch the fleecy clouds which 
sail aloft. At "The Lookout" above the falls is 
a view which makes the head reel. Here you liter- 
ally look over into the mighty chasm. You are far 
above the tops of the tallest trees. Titans have 
scooped out a granite bowl whose sides are so 
smooth that nothing can grow upon them save 
some ferns and mosses. The torrent roars and 
thunders below and at the time of our visit the 
thunder of a coming storm was reverberating 
through the m.ountains. 

The road along the Bash Bish stream is one of 
the wildest in Berkshire. Upon it are the houses 
of the Berkshire Club and some old deserted farms 
whose buildings, black with age and neglect, are 
now given over to the squirrels. How different 
when every doorway was full of merry children! 

Drenching rain and sharp lightning drove us 
into a shed, and when the storm slackened we were 
glad to obtain lodging and refreshment at the 
Alandar Hotel. The last guest had gone, the sea- 
son was over, the glorious monotony and lonely 
grandeur of the Berkshires were settling down. 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 

In his "Week on the Concord and Merrimack 
Rivers" Thoreau says, "We had gone to bed in 
summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer 
passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of 
time, like the turning of a leaf." It was so here. 

On the Alandar trail we found a shipwrecked 
man. His wife had deserted him in the great city 
until it became even more lonely than this moun- 
tain solitude. For months his only companions 
had been the birds and squirrels. He seemed glad 
to hear the sound of a human voice and was very 
kind but his spirit nursed a deep revolt against the 
institutions of society. It is always interesting to 
talk with these stranded men, the flotsam and jet- 
sam of life's ocean, proud and fierce in their re- 
bellion even when they long and sue for pity. It 
is not as we pace the deck of an ocean liner with 
some agreeable compagnon de voyage but as we 
talk with those upon the shore that we are most 
profited. 

"I have but few companions on the shore, 

They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea. 
Yet oft I think the ocean they've sailed o'er 

Is deeper known upon the strand to me. 
"The middle sea contains no crimson dulse, 

Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view. 
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse 

And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew." 
267 



GNADENSEE 

The solitary was not a wreck in his own estimation ; 
a more exact metaphor would be a landslide like 
the one which can be seen now on Saddleback. He 
had been wrenched and loosened from his proud 
perch and sliding down a rocky groove, tearing 
his way along, lay torn and bleeding like the talus 
at the foot of the cliflf. And yet the landslide has 
its use. To the strong and daring it is a steeper 
and more direct way up the mountain, even as we 
climb over the mistakes and fragments of some 
wasted life. Solomon could not keep the proverbs 
and so he wrote them, 't is said, but we know that 
it was that we might hear instruction and be wise. 

The Taconics, like all the mountains of New 
England, were once covered with an ice-cap of im- 
mense thickness. Instead of a landsHde there was 
a slow movement of this mighty glacier, polishing 
and grooving the rocks, scooping out the lake beds, 
piling up the drifts of gravel, leaving the boulders 
of Labrador for the stone-walls of New England 
farms. Thousands of feet above the Taconics the 
ice was piled. Down the Hudson valley, here at the 
foot of the mountain, it slowly crept seaward. 

Alandar is a unique place. The post-office, 
schoolhouse and several boarding-houses are all 
that give it a name and location, unless it be the 
268 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 

mountain which the Indians called Elk or Alandar. 
Who can explain the subtle fascination of a name? 
For years Alandar had beckoned and called, first 
as a mountain, then as a name. His white hood of 
feathery snow told when winter was nigh ; the rifts 
and seams on his rocky crown announced the de- 
parture of Boreas as the buds began to swell on 
the willows. In cloudy days a dusky pile, in the 
amber air of October a flush of brown and red, he 
had all the moods and witchery of a coquette. The 
years had pas.'ied like those in which Jacob sued 
and toiled for Rachel, and should we be disappoint- 
ed now? The walking-sticks of other climbers 
stood in the rack at the hotel but it was four long 
miles to the summit, and far into the night the 
storm roared, drenching all the trees and bushes. 
The morning broke fresh and breezy over Alan- 
dar. 

"Loud is the vale ! the voice is up 

With which she speaks when storms are gone, 
A mighty unison of streams ! 
Of all her voices, one !" 

Down in the meadow the swollen trout brook was 
hurrying on to join the roaring torrent in the 
gorge. It was a morning when everything moved. 
The time had come to "follow the gleam" and over- 
269 



GNADENSEE 

take it. A boy led the way through the rain- 
drenched forest, climbed warily over a wrecked and 
tottering bridge, piloted us to a shanty once used 
by wood-choppers and then turned back. Beyond 
this he had never been. He said, furthermore, that 
there were rattlesnakes on the mountain. P'or a 
long distance the overgrown trail led on, coming 
out at last into a narrow path marked by blazes on 
the trees. The steeper ascent, the stunted timber, 
the clearer light gleaming through the forest told 
us that now we were on the mountain. Emerging 
from the scrub we clambered up over the rocks to 
the summit. Mountain cranberries, the Vitis Idaea, 
were growing, and in the rock, firmly braced, the 
Geodetic Survey had erected a flagstaff from 
which a white flag was flapping in token of surren- 
der. Alandar was a ''hands-upper" as the Boers say. 

Cortez "silent on a peak of Darien." 

The soul is mute and speechless or uses the 
language of exclamation when on a new mountain. 
Prone on the rocks, or standing faced against the 
wild, free wind, the eye surveyed its aerial domain. 
First there was the township of Mount Washington. 
Located in the extreme southwestern corner of Mas- 
sachusetts, this elevated plateau lies between The 
270 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 

Dome on the east and Alandar on the west. One 
mountain looks down on the Housatonic, the other 
on the Hudson. To the north is a gorge through 
which Bash Bish, "daughter of rough old Taconic" 
escapes from her mountain prison, a place where 
the monks miglit have built their Grande Chartreuse 
or the Preraphaelites founded a colony. 

On Alandar the archaic rocks were lichen lined 
and a light carpet of grass covered the ledges. The 
west wind was blowing the cloud-rack of yesterday 
down the empyrean. What a spot to be buried in ! 
Moses was buried by the angels on Nebo. He who 
so often went up into the Mount to talk with God 
must lie in state near that high world from which 
the spirits fly on wings of light to this far orb. 
How intimately associated the mountains are with 
Christ's life on earth! It was from an exceeding 
high mountain that the devil showed him all the 
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. 
From the Horns of Hattin Jesus pronounced 
those Beatitudes which are as the dew in mountain 
pastures and which come sounding down our noon 
of time like voices of the morning. We read that 
he went up into a mountain to pray. It was on 
Hermcm that his glory burst forth. It was from 
Olivet' that he ascended when his work was done 
271 



GNADENSEE 



and it is mysteriously said in prophecy that "his 
feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of 
Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east." 

On Alandar one felt that old veneration for high 
places which is a universal instinct of the race. 
From the earliest times it was the custom to erect 
altars on some lofty and conspicuous spot. The 
worshipers were thus brought near to heaven. 
Like all innocent impulses, this one in time became 
perverted until the worship in the "high places" 
was only a form of degrading idolatry. 

When uncorrupted by vicious indulgence and 
when freed from human sacrifice there is some- 
thing beautiful in these old superstitions. The 
Aryan priests of our ancestors, in the home land on 
the high plateaus of central Asia, would climb the 
mountains at dawn to worship the sun. God's 
glory smote them in the face and who shall say 
there did not come hints and gleams of truth, that 
religious truth which is the primal instinct and in- 
heritance of the race? Even now the Guebers and 
Parsees keep up this old Zoroastrian cult. 

These mountains have had a most interesting his- 
tory. They are a branch or continuation of the 
Green Mountains of Vermont and in geology are 
known as the Taconic System. The rocks belong 
272 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 

to the Lower Silurian age. This means that at 
one time they were an old sea beach. Silurian 
rocks are widely spread over the globe, but these 
of the Taconic System are more or less meta- 
morphosed. By chemical changes and a rear- 
rangement of the constituents they have become 
hard and crystalline. Great forces, dynamic agen- 
cies whose nature we do not know, have raised and 
tilted those old sea-bottoms so that walking on 
the mountains your feet are planted in the sea. The 
limestones overlap and come to the surface, and up 
through the strata from the hot bowels of the earth 
the iron ores have been forced which abound in all 
this region. What ages rolled on in vast eonian 
times before man appeared ! How little we know 
of how the earth was formed or of the men who 
lived upon it ! They have left some names like Ta- 
conic and Alandar, but a dead savagery or civiliza- 
tion has a tale of pathos always ; it crouches and 
cowers in the fierce light of modern civilization ; 
there is that ever-present lament, " I was but I am 
not." And we may pass. This mountain wall, the 
outer rampart and bulwark of New England, may 
at some day train its cannon on all that we hold 
dear, and better, stronger men take our degenerate 
place. But the mountains will remain. The Ta- 
273 



GNADENSEE 

conies will catch the early dawn as it comes up 
over the eastern sea and behold the flaming ban- 
ners of the dying day as they go down behind the 
Catskills. And if the Taconics crumble and disap- 
pear, God will be, for "Before the mountains were 
brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth 
and the world, even from everlasting to everlast- 
ing thou art God" — scccula sccadorum, the Ohms 
of time, the cons of eternity. 

The inhabitants of Alandar, true to their New 
England instinct, take a just pride in their little 
church and schoolhouse. The latter was a model 
of neatness, order and beauty. The old homes and 
families may disappear, but the fires of education 
and religion are still kept burning on the moun- 
tains. At the base of Alandar and The Dome the 
trailing arbutus, Epigcea rcpcns, is abundant, also 
the pennyroyal. One of the boarding-houses is 
called the Pennyroyal Arms Inn. It might, with 
equal propriety, be called Arbutus Lodge. 

The way out from Alandar was by the mountain 
road and down through Sage's Ravine. It is such 
a place as the Dutch would call Clove-Kill, for a 
mighty chasm has been cleft or cloven. In some 
ways the ravine reminds one of the Lynn stream 
which ascends to the Doone Valley, only there the 
274 




J. R. Jordan, Lakcville. 



Sage's Ravine 



THE ALANDAR TRAIL 

gold of the gorse and the purple heather have their 
scents blown through the air by the sea wind. 
There is the open moorland and the rich, deep 
green of the combes. This stream over back of 
Bear Mountain is fully as wild, but there is a for- 
est sanctity and a suggestion of something pri- 
meval, which one never Jinds in England. Genera- 
tions of civilized people have not intercepted the 
delivery of nature's wares. One comes to the final 
cause of things ; there is a virgin freshness and 
charm. On the grass and heather of British heights 
your true American always longs for the forest and 
the mountain streams. He may pluck the heather, 
but he misses the blazed trail. 

From Bash Bish to Alandar and out by the Ra- 
vine had been a two days' tramp and a hard one. 
Often, in the forest roads, a speechless pause was 
made to behold the purple hills, rising or dipping 
down as the horizon changed. The traveler had 
climbed to Eagle's Nests, looked over dizzy 
heights, followed trackless streams, crossed the 
watershed of the Hudson and the Housatonic, as- 
cended a mountain and lingered before the wildest 
waterfalls in Berkshire. 

Poor Christopher North! the time came when 
he could no longer ramble over the moors and visit 
275 



GNADENSEE 

the lochs of his beloved Scotland. The gun and the 
fishing-rod were laid aside forever. He who had 
the strength and sinews of a Norseman became as 
helpless as a little child. Had the great nature 
lover and author of the Nodes AmbrosiarKr fol- 
lowed the Alandar trail he would have added an- 
other chapter to his book and found a solace for 
those evil days. 



276 



THE LAKE COUNTRY OF CON- 
NECTICUT 



"Soon after leaving Norfolk we came in sight of the Ta- 
conic range, a high and picturesque ridge forming the west- 
ern boundary of the Housatonic valley. The sun had al- 
ready declined, and this chain of dome-like hills was 
clothed in a garment of intense and exquisite blue, which 
hid every detail of mountain structure and exhibited the 
range as a silhouette of indigo upon a background of prim- 
rose sky. Behind the clear-obscure and enchanting pro- 
file of the hills, the misty peaks of the distant Catskills rose 
in the evening air, reminding us that between their shad- 
owy slopes and the blue Taconics, the mighty Hudson was 
sliding to the sea, freighted with the commerce of half a 
continent. . . The railroad follows the course of this stream 
(the Blackberry River), keeping, as usual, upon a terrace 
of drift. Thence the eye wanders down to the sheltered 
bottoms, where a line of pale green willows, skirting the 
stream, announces the lagging spring." — Old-World Ques- 
tions and New-World Answers. 



THE LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT 



No New Eng-lander ever looks back from his 
dinner on Thanksgiving Day without seeing lakes 
somewhere — his own name for them is ponds. It 
makes no difference whether he is a Highlander or 
a Lowlander, comes from the cloud-capped granite 
hills or the loud resounding sea, your true Yankee 
has some grains of granite in his constitution, 
scents the east wind as his native air and always 
sees a lake somewhere. Old England has its Lake 
Country, but all New England is one. In Plym- 
outh, Massachusetts, the inhabitants say they have 
a pond for every day in the year. They are so pure 
and transparent that, next to the broad Atlantic by 
his Marshfield home, nothing delighted the soul of 
Webster so much as a visit to these Plymouth 
Ponds. Cape Cod, with its long Hne of sand dunes 
pounded by the eternal surf, is covered with ponds 
from bay to ocean side. 'Tis even more so in 
279 



GNADENSEE 

Maine. One can launch his canoe at Moosehead, 
and go north from lake to lake through a hundred 
miles of hunting country. He will find in that for- 
est wilderness 

"many a gem of purest ray serene," 

with long, unpronounceable Indian name, which 
far surpasses Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine. 

Connecticut, too, has its Lake Country. God 
sank his ores beneath the bases of the hills, 
but left his gems upon the surface. The Lake 
Country properly includes the Twin Lakes of Salis- 
bury, the Riga lakes, the Lakeville and Sharon 
Ponds, Lake Waramaug whose shores resemble 
the Highlands of the Hudson, Highland Lake at 
Winsted, Bantam Lake near Litchfield, and many 
others, but the Lake Country referred to here is 
that included within the townships of Salisbury 
and Sharon and lying west of the Housatonic river. 
Starting at the Twin Lakes one can dip down in a 
chain of them to Gnadensee or at Riga Lake have 
boating on the top of a mountain. 

The scenery around the Twin Lakes is like that 

of Cumberland and Westmoreland. As one looks 

up at The Dome, which here rises abruptly, there 

is a striking parallel to Skiddaw and Derwentwater. 

280 



LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT 

The view from a point on the railroad is always a 
point of exclamation. 

The names M'^'ashining and Washinee are not the 
aboriginal designations though more easy to pro- 
nounce. The popular etymology is pleasant if not 
accurate. One is "Smihng" and the other "Laugh- 
ing Water." The difference of a syllable makes the 
difference between a smile and a laugh, and it is 
remarkable that when one lake is in ripple the 
other is placid. 

There is a legend that long before the white man 
came, Washining and Washinee were the twin 
daughters of an old chief who claimed all the land 
between the Housatonic and the Hudson and ruled 
his people with a rod of iron. His daughters were 
so fair that suitors came from every tribe, but none 
found favor. At last a hostile tribe made war on 
the old chief. The invaders were beaten off, but 
their leader, a handsome young brave, was captured 
and condemned to death by torture. While he 
was a prisoner each sister, without any knowledge 
of the other's thoughts, fell in love with him. Se- 
cretly they brought him food, and nursed him. 
Wildly but vainly they begged their father to set 
him free. One day in great sorrow they confessed 
each to the other this secret love. Finally the time 
281 



GNADENSEE 

came for the torture, but that they might not behold 
it, on the last night, just as the moon was rising 
above the trees, they paddled out on the lake in 
their little canoe. Clasped in each other's arms 
they sprang into the water and disappeared for- 
ever. Long the Indians fancied that in the moon- 
light on Washining and then on Washinee they saw 
a canoe floating empty and alone. As they looked 
it would, disappear, and then over the water came 
that mad laughter and mockery, the Ha-ha-ha! 
Jia-ha-ha! of the loons. 

The daughters left their names, which the lakes 
bear to this day. 

All this region around the Twin Lakes is haunt- 
ed by the great soul of Beecher. He loved to drift 
over the limpid waters and follow the trout streams. 
For him the mountains had their aisles of gloom 
and sailing continents of vapor. The finest chapters 
in the Star Papers are the record and impressions 
of his summers here. He never detached the ten- 
drils of his heart from Salisbury. 

His friend Adam Reid, the eloquent Scotch di- 
vine, also left here an enduring fame. He was an 
elect fisherman and used the fly, one of the five 
points of his Calvinism being that "any fule can 
catch a fish ivith a wurrnm." 
282 




15 

H 

a 

W 

H 
O 

w 

O 
d" 

K 



LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT 

Only a great soul can appreciate nature. He 
must believe that back of beauty and cosmic 
force there is an unfettered, infinite, personal Spirit 
— not only believe it but love to have it so. If the 
universe be only an eternal rhythm and dissonance 
which has in itself the power to create what appears 
but is not itself created, then half its beauty and 
charm are gone. The highest that we know is 
spirit. Nature is but the robe and outer court of 
deity. The Word spake and cosmos rose, natura 
grew, not self-evolved but subject to spirit. 

The Riga Lakes are an Adirondack idyl. As one 
rows out among their rocky islets or follows the 
sinuous reaches of wooded shore it is like being 
set down in some archaic and primeval world. God 
is present, not man, but it is God in being and ex- 
istence only, the I AM of the burning bush. These 
lakes are such as Thoreau would have loved, that 
strange genius who does not describe a rock or tree 
but becomes one. If one wants the human touch, 
the grassy slope, the children playing on the shore, 
blue waters smiling in beauty, the Riga lakes will 
not attract, but if he wishes to see the world as 
God created and then left it, he will visit them. 
The Lakeville Ponds are a second pair of twins 
which eventually send their waters into the Housa- 
283 



GNADENSEE 

tonic. There is a watershed between them, so that 
they do not connect. The larger is Wononscopomuc, 
a lake without reedy shores and resembling the fa- 
mous "Stockbridge Bowl." It is the lake of edu- 
cational institutions with its Hotchkiss and Taconic 
Schools; its waves break to the music of Homeric 
cadences. There is a beautiful drive around it and 
the Interlaken Road leads past the buildings of the 
Hotchkiss School. Few institutions have such a 
commanding site, whose northern vista opens 
through the gates of Berkshire. 

Here in the family lot, looking down on the lake, 
close to the school she founded, Mrs. Hotchkiss 
was laid to rest in a chih November day of 1901, 
the casket being borne through lines of students 
and professors standing with uncovered heads. 
Not far away is the Montgomery House of Revo- 
lutionary fame, where two British officers, a wound- 
ed Captain Montgomery and his surgeon, prisoners 
on parole, were entertained and cared for by the 
Livingstons who had fled from their Manor of 
Clermont on the Hudson. It is a great pity that 
this old mansion was ever allowed to fall into decay, 
for it was a fine specimen of Colonial architecture. 

The Interlaken Road leads past Wononpakook or 
Long Pond as it is commonly called. One must 
284 



LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT 

drive in through private grounds, however, to 
get near the lake, which is shy and jealous of its 
beauty. If less academic than Wononscopomuc it 
is preferred by campers, who pitch their tents in the 
pines on the eastern shore. 

The Sharon Ponds are on opposite sides of In- 
dian Mountain, as we were told in the opening chap- 
ter of this book. Many wish that the one known as 
Mudge could change its name. There is a fringe 
of willows on its western shore and in lieu of the 
endless crystal or silver lakes Willowmere would be 
a relief. The willow is the tree for lakes and water- 
courses the world over. Ever since Jewish exiles 
hung their harps on the tamarisks by the Euphrates 
the willow has been the tree of exile and pathos. 
Do they not weep for that lost race whose wig- 
wams once formed a village at the outlet? 

We have persistently called the lake Webotuck, 
since it flows into that river. 

For what noted? Must every sheet of water be 
famous, as though beauty were not its own excuse 
for being? But Webotuck has its own modest 
fame. Dragging their cannon up its western slope, 
the artillerists of Sharon Valley often fired across 
the lake in mimic war, their trajectory being pro- 
phetic of war that was real. Strange juxtaposition, 
285 



GNADENSEE 

that Moravians who would not fight and men en- 
gaged in the manufacture of deadly missiles should 
both come here! Will some antiquarian, hundreds 
of years hence, digging out the shells on the eastern 
shore of the lake, write learnedly about the battle 
that must have been fought there, find traces of 
men in the iron age, or will some Moravian millen- 
nium then have dawned, when the nations shall 
learn war no more? 

There is no need to speak of Gnadensee when so 
much of this book has been written about it. The 
name as interpreted by its Moravian history in- 
duces a mood holier than any dream of beauty, 
though grace and beauty are but sides of a comple- 
mental unity. As one drives by this Moravian 
strand which holy men knew and loved, Gnadensee 
seems like Gcnnesaret of old, a lake apart. Its beauty 
cannot be told by reason of a glory which excelleth. 



286 



ECHOES AND RIPPLES 



"Beautiful Sharon ! If you have been there you may pos- 
sibly say that my language is too strong. Topographically 
it is not more exquisite in situation or outlook than a doz- 
en other New England villages, but to me, it is the fairest 
spot on the globe. 

When I go to heaven I hope to begin the journey from 
Sharon. 

There is a central avenue a mile long and something over 
two hundred feet wide. On either side are stately elms, 
whose branches interlace, giving a picturesqueness to 
the place which it would be difficult to duplicate. These 
elms have looked down on two or three generations of 
men v^ho have done their day's work and then gone to the 
churchyard at the end of the village. . . . 

The drives about Sharon are exceptionally fine. During 
the first week of my stay I explored the surrounding coun- 
try, sometimes on foot and then again on horseback. From 
every hilltop I had a new view, the landscape being varied 
by plains, rivers, and lakes, all framed by ranges of moun- 
tains along the horizon line. . . . 

When you know all you will understand why Sharon is 
like paradise; and why I am building a cottage there on 
a hilltop just outside the village limits." 

— "Brown Studies," George H. Hepivorlh. 



ECHOES AND RIPPLES 



The mountain by The Lake of Grace has been 
cHmbed for the sunset. Down through the thick 
woods and over the steep ledges the cHmber has 
sHd into the green pastures by its shining levels. 
The twilight falls. Tliere is only the faintest pos- 
sible ripple on the water. The cow-bells tinkle 
in the meadow and the water gnats are flitting 
about on the surface of the lake. 'T is the hour for 
reflection and reverie, the echoes and ripples of 
that olden time whose memories are our sweetest 
dreams. Pale forms of the past crowd and hover 
on the shore. Above the torpor of ilHmitable 
woods rises the war-whoop of the savage. The 
daring hunter comes that he may find pelt for 
those patroons and lords of the manor whose 
great feudal estates stretched from the Hudson 
nearly to the Lake of Grace. What high-souled men 
lived in those old days ! what courtesy and pride of 
life ! The cannon at the entrance to their manors 
289 



GNADENSEE 

was fired upon the birth or death of one in the fam- 
ily. Grandes dames on gala days appeared stifi and 
elegant in their brocades and satins. Their love 
letters are signed Portia and Diana ; their husbands 
sit in Colonial Assemblies. 

Then saintly souls thread the forest paths, and 
Zinzendorf's daughter and Cammerhof come from 
the blue Saxon mountains over the sea and from 
Bethlehem, to tell the story of the Cross and hu- 
man brotherhood to Mohican savages. A pale 
young Scotchman is catechizing his Indian con- 
verts and preparing them for their first sacrament. 
His body is wasted by fever and he hastens to 
complete his work ere the end. Then out from the 
shore Indian canoes paddle noiselessly and bear 
his body robed in white over the pallid waters to 
its burial under the sighing pines. A weary Pala- 
tine next appears, starved and oppressed by the 
very charity that brought him here, the saddest of 
all our exiles save the Huguenot. 

The descendants of English Puritans are now 
seen pouring over the Litchfield Hills, a serious 
race, doubting not they are the very elect of God, 
men who have made their mountain county justly 
famous by the splendid roll of great names they 
have given to the country. 

290 



ECHOES AND RIPPLES 

A wonderful voice is heard on Sharon Street. 
'T is Whitefield's, calling on sinners to repent, and 
those marvelous tones are borne almost to the 
Lake of Grace. 

And now the war drum rolls. The Sharon men 
have heard the echo of those minute guns at Lex- 
ington and the "Old Continentals" are lining up 
on the Green, young men then, all of them. There 
is one whose name was Maxam. He was at Crown 
Point and Isle au Noix ; with Ethan Allen he tried 
to capture Montreal, was taken captive, ironed, 
put on board a prison ship, sent back and forth 
across the Atlantic, escaped in New York, made 
his way back to his native town, enlisted again, was 
at Valley Forge and Monmouth and White Plains, 
fought under Washington, Lafayette, Baron Steu- 
ben and Lee. He ought to have been one of Wash- 
ington's Life Guard and had a monument, but the 
old man had to appear in Litchfield Courthouse in 
1832 and plead for a pension. 

The songs of Hessian troopers are heard. It is 
Luther's Hymn, "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott." 
It rolls along the valley of the Webotuck; the 
mountains echo it again. Burgoyne's surrendered 
men are marched through these western towns. 

In their hearts they never loved George the Third 
291 



GNADENSEE 

and they could not have hated George the Good; 
rough fellows ready to plunder patriot or Tory 
alike, quite ready to desert, marry and raise up sons 
who swear by no Fatherland but America. The 
nascent years roll on. Here by The Lake of Grace 
the trombones of Bethlehem are heard, and that 
holy Moravian Litany which has pealed its stately 
words from the frozen shores of Greenland to the 
hot lands under the equator, read and chanted now 
over the graves of Bruce and Powell. There are 
other echoes and voices. The "weak piping time 
of peace" is over. The screech of a Hotchkiss 
shell tears the summer air over old Poconnuck and 
on many a battle-field and "Bloody Angle" where 
the battalions of Lee are massed, tears its gory way 
through dead and mangled men. Every May the 
eye has a mist of tears as garlands are placed at 
bugle calls on the graves of those who are mar- 
shaled on the mystic plains. 

The twilight fades into a deeper gloom ; on the 
village street the bells in the churches are tolling 
the death of McKinley. A bright star rises over 
Gnadensee. It is Herrnhut, "The Watch of the 
Lord." 



As several views in the Lake Country which appear in 
different chapters of this book were taken expressly for it, 
the author would acknowledge his indebtedness to F. N. 
Kneeland of Northampton, Massachusetts, whose book on 
Northampton, The Meadow City, is a beautiful specimen of 
photographic art. 



JUN 4 1903 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 076 267 2 



